Inside the Classroom:
Interaction in Elementary School English Lessons in Japan
Yukawa Emiko
Kyoto Notre Dame Women's University, Kyoto, Japan
e-mail: ved04614@nifty.ne.jp
After some 20 years of debate about the introduction of English education at the elementary school level in Japan, foreign language education (in reality, English in most cases) was formally introduced to the elementary school curriculum in Japan in April of this year as one possible element of "education for international understanding" in the new Integrated Studies class period (Sogotekina gakushu no jikan). This paper is an investigation of the kinds of instruction that are now actually being used in elementary school English classrooms. Observations, including videotapes, audiotapes and onsite field notes, were made in 11 English classrooms in public and private schools taught by teachers with different native languages, professional backgrounds and teaching positions. English interaction in these lessons was analyzed using the theoretical framework described by Doughty and Williams (1998) and Long and Robinson (1998), which makes a three-fold distinction among "focus on forms, focus on meaning, and focus on form".
The analysis revealed that the majority of the instruction was "formS-based". Due to the limited hours of lessons per week, students' knowledge of these forms did not appear to accumulate as the grade level increased. The study points to the difficulty of teaching at the higher grade levels due to the current teaching conditions (limited teaching hours and lack of concrete instructional goals, etc.), and due to the inevitable gap emerging between the students' increasing level of intellect and the level of English activities dictated by their low linguistic ability. "Meaning-based" instruction and "focus on form" instruction, in which students use English as the means of communication at least at the receptive level, were observed in a few classrooms. The instructional content was appropriate for the students' intellectual level, but this type of instruction requires greater English ability and pedagogical skills on the part of the teacher.
Details of observations in each type of classroom are provided. Other problems of the current system are also discussed. It is concluded that improvement in the amount of teaching time and the pedagogy employed, as well as substantial teacher training, is urgently needed.
