Professional Development of English Language Teachers in Asia

Lessons from Japan and Vietnam

Kayoko Hashimoto, Van-Trao Nguyen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138220263
• eBook ISBN: 9781315413235
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Why has English language proficiency in Japan remained so low in comparison to other Asian countries? Has Vietnam attempted to improve English language teaching because ASEAN has adopted English as its working language? Why do English language teachers struggle with curriculum changes imposed by governments in order to make them competitive in the international community? Do professional development (PD) programs actually meet the needs of teachers?

This book addresses issues surrounding these questions by examining how the Japanese and Vietnamese governments have approached and defined the PD of English language teachers and how such PD programs have been delivered. It further analyses the impact of policy changes on individual teachers and explores how PD can help teachers to implement such changes effectively at the micro-level. PD of language teachers or language teacher education is relatively new as a field of inquiry in Applied Linguistics. By including case studies of Japan and Vietnam in the one volume, this book embarks on the challenging task of demonstrating that PD is an essential element of the successful implementation of language policies in Asia, where World Englishes have been shaped by distinct local contexts.

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The professional development of English language teachers in Asia

Lessons from Japan and Vietnam

Kayoko Hashimoto

Both the Japanese and Vietnamese governments have designated the year 2020 as a milestone for instituting important changes in educational policies in order to be competitive in the rapidly changing international community, and English language teaching (ELT) is a key element of such changes. In the “Japan Vision 2020,” a discussion paper prepared by the Japan Vision 2020 Study Group of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), “strengthening foreign language communication” was suggested as one means of ensuring the success of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics (MEXT, 2014). This was based on MEXT’s “English Education Reform Plan Corresponding to Globalisation,” which stated that “timed with the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, in order for the full-scale development of new English education in Japan, MEXT will incrementally promote educational reform from 2014” (MEXT, 2013, original English and emphasis). In 2014, the “Top Global University Project” replaced the “Global 30 Project,” which was jointly proposed by six ministries in 2008 with the ambitious target of attracting 300,000 overseas students to Japanese universities by 2020 (MEXT, 2008). In Vietnam, the government issued Decision 1400, “The Teaching and Learning of Foreign Languages in the National Education System Project, 2008–2020,” in 2008 in the expectation that enhanced foreign language capacity would increase the nation’s competitiveness within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) community (see Chapter 7 of this volume). In fact, in the following year, ASEAN officially adopted English as the working language of the community. Under Decision 1400, the National Foreign Language Project 2020 (hereafter, Project 2020) was to be implemented by the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET).

Although the two nations’ historical relationships with English are vastly different, both Japan and Vietnam have managed to maintain their own language as the national language at schools and in the workplace, while at the same time, people’s English proficiency level has remained low. According to the EF English Proficiency Index (EF, 2017), Japan is ranked 37th (classified as low proficiency) and Vietnam 34th (classified as moderate proficiency) among 80 countries in 2017; they were 9th and 7th, respectively, among the 20 Asian countries. The index shows that while Vietnamese people’s proficiency has improved over the last three years, the proficiency of Japanese people has worsened. Japan’s disappointingly low proficiency level is also highlighted by its EIKEN (Japan’s Test in Practical English Proficiency) scores (Aoki, 2017). EF (2017) reports that Asia has the wider disparities in English proficiency than other regions (Europe, Latin America, Africa and Middle East). As Tsui and Tollefson (2007) point out, Asia’s relationships with English vary significantly, depending on the way in which each country has responded to the challenge globalisation poses for non-English-speaking countries. In fact, the EF Index reveals very different profiles for the two countries: Japan scores well in terms of gross national income (GNI), Internet penetration (93.3 per cent) and mean years of schooling, but poorly in terms of government education spending (9.3 per cent); Vietnam scores higher than Japan only in relation to education spending (21.4 per cent). The data indicate that GNI and technology are not essential factors in determining people’s fluency in English, although Japan’s low public spending on education is discussed in relation to gender inequality among primary school teachers in Chapter 3 in this volume, and limited access to the Internet is pointed out as a problem for teachers in regional areas in Chapter 9. In both Japan and Vietnam, however, as most of the chapters in this volume demonstrate, teachers are often blamed for the stagnating level of English proficiency.

This book is not a comparative study of Japan and Vietnam. We believe, though, that presenting chapters on English teachers’ professional development (PD) in the two countries in a single volume will shed light on some important aspects of the PD of English teachers in Asian countries that have had to deal with the political, economic and cultural influences of the English language. This book focuses on PD for pre- and in-service teachers of English as a foreign language in Japan and Vietnam in relation to their recent educational reforms, which have been led by their central governments.

PD of language teachers, or language teacher education (LTE), is a field of inquiry in Applied Linguistics. LTE is relatively new – only emerging over the last 20 years or so – and although it has been established as an independent domain of inquiry, it “lags far behind language learning and language teaching as core areas of research interest” (Borg, 2013). The current issues in LTE include teacher cognition, knowledge of language, knowledge of teaching, knowledge about language, the practicum, reflective practice and teacher research (Borg, 2013), but few studies examine LTE or PD for language teachers in relation to language policies in education. Ultimately, teachers are the agents who implement language policies at the micro-level (Baldauf, 2006). Therefore, for the effective implementation of any new scheme, PD must be incorporated into both policy and planning. However, in many countries in Europe and Asia, pedagogical issues are delegated to teachers and there is silence on the macro-level (Diallo & Liddicoat, 2014). Yet teachers are often the easy target of blame for policy implementation failures.

Another gap in the literature relates to the connections between PD for language teachers and teacher education in general, while there is also a lack of data about teacher education in Asian countries. For example, Walter and Briggs (2012) identify seven aspects of PD that make the most difference to teachers. They are as follows:

1. is concrete and classroom-based;
2. brings in expertise from outside the school;
3. involves teachers in the choice of areas to develop and activities to undertake;
4. enables teachers to work collaboratively with peers;
5. provides opportunities for mentoring and coaching;
6. is sustained over time; and
7. is supported by effective school leadership.

(Walter & Briggs, 2012, p. 1)

This data is based on 38 studies – the majority are case studies of English-speaking countries; only one is from Asia (Malaysia), in comparison with Australia. The items listed can also be applied to PD for English language teachers in Japan and Vietnam, but as many chapters in this volume indicate, the situation varies according to the local context and the individual nature of the PD. Scholars such as Lee and Day (2016) examine “western” and “Asian (Chinese)” perspectives in terms of quality and change in teacher education, but more studies are needed to provide a better understanding of local contexts and to avoid west versus east generalisations.

The issue of global competitiveness in education has also affected teacher education. Mayer et al. (2016, p. 149) state,

In Australia, as elsewhere, perceptions of the teaching profession and initial teacher education have been influenced by economic issues related to global competitiveness as measured by international assessment programs such as the Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA) and imperatives argued by business groups.

As discussed in Chapter 3, Japan’s teaching license renewal system was proposed in 2007 with the aim of weeding out unfit teachers in order to rebuild the public education system, in tandem with concomitant efforts to reform higher education at that time. Making the higher education internationally competitive has been a pressing issue for Japan. As mentioned earlier, the Global 30 Project was announced in 2008, and one of its major goals was to attract more international students to Japan (Hashimoto, 2013). The internationalisation of higher education is now measured by university rankings, which are determined by various organisations around the world, and international students use these rankings as a tool when choosing a university.

In Europe, the need for a common language to encourage staff and student mobility across universities in the region has led to the rapid proliferation of courses and programs delivered through the medium of English (Tollefson & Tsui, 2014). Phillipson (2006) sees that, in the European context created by the Bologna Process, internationalisation means English-medium higher education. Tollefson and Tsui (2014) further argue that such internationalisation of higher education has affected secondary education because English needs to be taught at a higher level in secondary schools in order to prepare students for their university studies in English. The case of Europe has an interesting implication for ASEAN. Since ASEAN adopted English as its working language in 2009, it has changed the nature of multilingualism in the region; as Kirkpatrick (2012) points out, English has replaced local and indigenous languages other than the national language. Interestingly, Japan is indifferent to or oblivious of the language situation in the ASEAN community: Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs only briefly mentions English being the common language of ASEAN in its latest report on Japan and ASEAN (MOFA, 2017).

Although adopting English as the working language of the ASEAN community could be seen as a political decision not to give additional power to any individual member nation, the responses to the decision vary significantly between ASEAN members (see Chapter 2 of this volume). For example, the Thai government implemented the “World-Class Standard School” policy in 2008 with an emphasis on the importance of learning foreign languages, which led to a boom in Japanese as a second foreign language (English is the first foreign language in Thailand). Although Chinese language has the largest number of learners among foreign languages because of the large population of so-called Thai Chinese, the number of Japanese language learners has been increasing rapidly compared to the number of Chinese learners (Japan Foundation, 2017). In Vietnam, although the government launched a policy to promote the teaching and learning of foreign languages in 2008, as noted earlier, it is reported that neither employers nor blue/white collar workers consider a foreign language to be an important job-related skill (Bodewig et al., 2014). These examples suggest that the future consequences of English as the working language of ASEAN are worth investigating. When the former secretary general of ASEAN, Surin Pitsuwan, passed away in 2017, a newspaper article quoted his comments on the future of ASEAN 50 years after its establishment:

ASEAN at 50 is facing a middle-age crisis… We have come this far but to go further we need to re-examine many assumptions that have led us here, such as non-interference, absolute sovereignty, and dependency on external help.

(Ono, 2017)

This “external help” could be economic assistance with political leverage, which Pitsuwan was concerned about (Ono, 2017), but PD for English language teachers is one area in which external organisations could certainly offer assistance. Chapters 2 and 10 in this volume refer to the need for such assistance in Vietnam and the ASEAN community, and Chapter 5 discusses a PD program in Japan organised by a foreign university and funded by a foreign government. Certainly, PD for English language teachers in countries such as Japan and Vietnam provides business opportunities for external bodies in English-speaking countries; typically, teachers would be trained by native-speaker instructors to improve their teaching skills and language proficiency. The success of such programs, however, seems to be dependent upon an understanding of not only the needs of individual teachers but also the local context, including the education system, the roles of local and central governments and the standing of English in the community. In this sense, PD for English language teachers presents “real-world” language related problems with which Applied Linguistics has attempted to engage (Wee, 2013), as well as playing an important role in shaping World Englishes within Asia.

Preview of the chapters

The book has two sections: one is a collection of studies on PD for English language teachers in Japan and the other focuses on Vietnam. All scholars have different approaches to the topic and different sets of data on which to base their arguments, but all strongly believe in the importance of PD for the successful implementation of educational policies, and all are aware of the potential effect on individual teachers. Chapter 2 first reports on PD for ELT in the ASEAN community in order to provide some context for the following chapters.

Chapter 2 “Professional Development as Part of English Language Education Initiatives in the ASEAN Community” by Van-Trao Nguyen and Khoi Ngoc Mai examines how governments and state educational management authorities in the ASEAN countries have responded to the need for a greater level of English competency, highlighting the changes in education policy to foster the PD of English language teachers. It finds that while most countries have introduced educational reforms to promote ELT, to date, there is no agreed framework for teacher competency or shared curriculum for training teachers across the region. The chapter suggests that closer cooperation between countries on PD for English language teachers would improve the overall standard of English language education in the region. The issue of cooperation between ASEAN countries to create a common framework for the PD of English teachers deserves further attention, as it could be an important factor in strengthening the unity of the community.

The first chapter on PD for English teachers in Japan is Chapter 3, “Teaching Licence Renewal and the Professional Development of Japanese Primary School Teachers of English” by Kayoko Hashimoto. Setting 2020, the year of the Tokyo Olympics, as the deadline for the delivery of the English language education reforms, in 2013, the Japanese government replaced the existing “foreign language activities” offered in Grades 5 and 6 with “foreign languages” as a compulsory subject. According to the reform plan, homeroom teachers without any qualifications in foreign language teaching must teach English, possibly with the support of external personnel such as native speakers. Training teachers to improve their proficiency is not acknowledged as the government’s responsibility. “English language teaching” is, however, one of the topics covered by the courses that teachers must take as part of the teaching license renewal process every ten years. This chapter examines the way PD for primary school teachers is addressed in educational policies and public documents, and argues that it embodies the problems surrounding primary school English language teaching, and at the same time is constructed by the particular nature of PD within the Japanese education system – namely, the potential for conflict between individual empowerment and organisational control.

The struggles of individual teachers to deal with the policy changes are documented in Chapter 4, “Curriculum Reform and Professional Development: The Problems Faced by Japanese Senior High School Teachers” by Gregory Paul Glasgow. The senior high school reform initiative in the national curriculum for foreign languages, implemented from 2013, requires Japanese teachers of English (JTEs) to “conduct their English classes in English.” However, JTEs are provided with little information about the PD they will need to carry out this initiative at the classroom and institutional levels. This chapter investigates the struggles JTEs face in order to determine the types of educational support they need. Based on the quantitative and qualitative data from 40 teachers located in Tokyo, the study finds that key areas of PD and support for JTEs will include how to make confident language choices in their classrooms and how to p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figure and tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• 1 The professional development of English language teachers in Asia: lessons from Japan and Vietnam
• 2 Professional development as part of English language education initiatives in the ASEAN community
• PART I Professional development of English language teachers in Japan
• PART II Professional development of English language teachers in Vietnam
• Index