Early Professional Development in EFL Teaching

Perspectives and Experiences from Japan

Chitose Asaoka

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781788923231
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Enseñanza de las artes lingüísticas

This book examines the perspectives and experiences of student teachers who are in the process of becoming secondary school English teachers in Japan. It reports on the trainee teachers' attitudes towards theory and practice in their professional development.Through a discussion of what professional expertise should look like in this context, the book identifies the challenges faced by the Initial Teacher Education (ITE) system in Japan, and suggests support and mediational activities that should be included as components of the ITE curriculum.The book contains valuable rich descriptions of trainee teachers' experiences, and will be of interest to those working in EFL both in Japan and elsewhere.

1 Introduction

Making a lesson plan using content-based instruction was extremely difficult for me. No matter how much I thought, I couldn’t make any progress, only time passing by. What you have never experienced as a student is very difficult
to master, I guess.

(Kento, Fourth interview)

1.1 Background

This study emerged out of my own experiences in Japan as a teacher educator in English as a foreign language (EFL); I have worked in an undergraduate-level initial teacher education (ITE) programme in the country for two decades. In this role, I have endeavoured to guide student teachers, who are mostly native Japanese speakers, without any set framework to define what teacher expertise they should have mastered upon graduation. Indeed, a vast amount of theoretical knowledge must be transmitted to student teachers at higher education institutions (HEIs), while student teachers themselves seem desperate for practical experiences as opposed to theoretical knowledge. On the other hand, I am remote from student teachers’ school-based experiences and can only monitor their development through teaching logs or stories they relate about their teaching practice. The only opportunity open to me as a teacher educator is a single visit to observe the student teachers’ demonstration lessons towards the end of their teaching practice. In other words, it is rare to expect collaboration between HEIs and schools in developing student teachers’ expertise in this specific context. In addition, as the opening quote from a student teacher, Kento, indicates, student teachers themselves seem to struggle. At HEIs, they learn about up-to-date teaching approaches and methods, such as employing a communicative practice or a student-centred approach or using English as a medium of instruction; whereas at schools, they face the reality of the classroom and are asked to adjust to school contexts, and thus cannot freely put theory into practice. They may also have no previous experiences of learning English as students through such up-to-date approaches; thus, they may find it a challenge to draw on their own learning experiences.

As a researcher and a teacher educator, I felt the necessity to re-examine what elements should constitute teacher expertise in a Japanese EFL context and how student teachers can develop this professional expertise effectively during ITE. For student teachers to become good English teachers, what qualities are necessary and what kind of support can ITE provide? I had already articulated these questions at the onset of this research study.

1.2 The Linguistic Context of Japan

The linguistic context of Japan should first be described, so we can understand the larger context of English language teaching in Japan. In Japan, English is effectively taught at school as a foreign language, since the majority of Japanese do not have to use English in their everyday lives. In fact, Japanese society is drastically changing to become a multilingual society, mainly due to the need to compensate for labour shortages (Heinrich, 2012; Kanno, 2008). Following the 1990 revision of the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of foreign nationals in Japan, including the descendants of Japanese emigrants. The latest figure for the number of foreign nationals legally living in Japan is 2,382,822 as of December 2016, which is 1.8% of the total population (Ministry of Justice, 2017). Chinese constitute the largest group (29.2%), followed by Korean nationals (19.0%) and Filipinos (10.2%). Hence, nowadays, English is more commonly used for intranational communication than before within the domestic context due to ethnic and linguistic diversity. However, as already mentioned, the majority still speak and use Japanese as their mother tongue in daily life, in school as well as in the workplace.

In the early 2000s, following the rapid globalisation of the economy, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) faced the urgent need to upgrade the general level of English language education in order to compete with other countries in a global society, since English is essential as an international lingua franca. As one of the actions to cope with the need, in the 2008 school year, English started to be taught to fifth and sixth graders in primary school as a ‘foreign language activity’ class in which pupils are expected to experiment and have fun with English. Furthermore, in the 2020 school year, English will become a mandatory subject for fifth and sixth graders, and along with this change, the foreign language activity classes will also become mandatory for third and fourth graders (MEXT, 2017).

In Japan, the compulsory education period is six years of elementary school and three years of lower secondary school, called junior high school. The advancement rate in upper secondary schools, called senior high schools (three years), is currently 98% according to MEXT (2017). English is only one of the elective foreign languages to choose from in the national curriculum for junior high school, but MEXT has encouraged schools to teach English in principle; hence, almost all junior high school students and senior high school students learn English (MEXT, 2010d). This implies that students presently learn English for three years in junior high school and for another three years in senior high school – for a total of six years at least in secondary education. In regard to a medium of instruction, although MEXT (2010a, 2017) encourages secondary school teachers to use English, in reality, most teachers still use Japanese as the main classroom language, or use a mixture of English and Japanese at best. Additionally, as most universities have a section on English as part of their entrance examinations, many senior high school students are instrumentally motivated to study English in order to obtain good scores on the tests rather than learning the language as a communicative tool. At the tertiary education level, most undergraduate students, even non-English majors, are required to take English language courses for at least the first two years of their undergraduate study, although they are usually required to take only one or two courses per week unless they are English majors. As the description so far indicates, students in Japan currently learn English for some 6–10 years in school and college, while there has been ongoing criticism that many do not have a high enough proficiency in English; often teachers and teacher education are the target for this criticism.

At the same time, although English is still not widely used for social interaction or for communication in business or government, its importance is more widely recognised than before, particularly in business and the tourism industry as society has globalised. For instance, obtaining a good score on the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC), which is a widely used proficiency test that evaluates a learner’s English language competences in the workplace, is essential in Japan for finding a job or for promotion. Some companies have even made a rule to use English as an official language in their workplaces. Also, due to technological advances, it is not very difficult for learners in Japan to access materials in English: a wide range of both authentic and edited materials are available nowadays beyond the classroom, ranging from films, news, podcasts, online materials and e-learning courses to digital textbooks. This situation has led to what is currently called an ‘English boom’ in Japan.

This section has briefly described the context in which EFL student teachers, teachers and teacher educators in Japan are situated and the issues that they need to make sense of while working on their professional development in ITE. In the newest national curriculum called Course of Study, MEXT (2017) puts more emphasis on the active role of English language learners as an agent rather than a passive recipient of knowledge about the language, which EFL student teachers also need to be aware of. Due to the upcoming 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo, the English language as well as English language teaching will also be more economically significant and valuable in Japan.

1.3 Overview of the Book

This is a qualitative study situated in a Japanese context. It is also an illustration of my own professional learning as a teacher educator through a ‘reflective conversation with the situation’ (Schön, 1983: 295). Employing a case-study approach, I conducted the study with the aim of exploring and interpreting EFL student teachers’ development processes in their ITE programme. The student teachers’ experiences during their training at HEIs as well as at schools were investigated in order to examine what factors (e.g. theoretical knowledge transmission, observation and emulation of an expert teacher, reflection, actual teaching) impacted on their expertise development and how student teachers themselves reflected on their own professional development.

Since the main purpose of the study is an in-depth exploration of student teachers’ experiences and perceptions of their own development in ITE, the methods employed to collect and analyse data are based on the principles of qualitative studies (Brown & Dowling, 1998; Cohen et al., 2000; Silverman, 2000) since qualitative research allows more descriptive and interpretive inquiry and focuses more on a detailed picture of the particular. The main overarching research question that I formulated at the initial stage of the research that guided this research study was:

(1) How do pre-service EFL student teachers in Japan perceive their professional expertise development over time?

However, as the data analysis proceeded along with the data collection, more specific key concepts emerged from the data, which led to the articulation of some sub-questions. These remain general in character but gave more specific directions to this research study:

(2) How do student teachers perceive theory and practice in their training? Which factors do they find more influential in shaping their professional expertise development?

(3) How do student teachers’ perceptions of theory and practice change over time?

(4) Do student teachers perceive that there is a gap between theory and practice? If so, how do they address the problem?

(5) If student teachers see it as a problem, how do they mitigate the disparity between theory and practice? What are the tools (i.e. emulation, reflection) that they employ and why?

Through reflective journals and in-depth interviews, this study aims, in particular, to investigate how student teachers develop their teacher expertise; how their views on what makes a good English teacher shift and develop; and what factors, such as interaction with or emulation of others, impact on their learning-to-teach processes. As we shall see later, emulation of others, the implicit use of which is often criticised in professional development (Lunenberg et al., 2007) as it may not effectively allow student teachers to link their own pedagogical choices to abstract theory, turns out to be an important element in student teachers’ expertise development in this study.

Seven participants who were EFL student teachers in an ITE programme at a Japanese university joined this study in April 2009. Six of them, Kento, Chie, Mari, Yurika, Nana and Saori (pseudonyms), were lower secondary school student teachers, whereas the other participant, Mari (pseudonym), was a prospective upper secondary school English teacher. The participants were followed over one-and-a-half years, both in formal settings (e.g. journals, interviews, observation) and additional ad hoc opportunities such as observation of teaching, which took place on a voluntary basis outside the statutory requirements. The data collection for this study is divided into two phases: training in an ITE programme at an HEI, and teaching practice at a secondary school. Multiple tools were employed for collecting the qualitative data which included interviews, journals and observation in order to maximise the validity and reliability of the research study.

Chapter 2: Educational Reforms in Japan, provides a detailed background on educational reforms in Japan, including those in English language education as well as the ITE system. I first offer an historical overview of educational reforms in Japan in English language teaching, as pressured by globalisation. I then discuss reforms and challenges in the ITE system in Japan by referring to both parties: HEIs where student teachers basically gain theoretical knowledge; and secondary schools, where they experience actual teaching. The chapter concludes that those challenges that ITE in Japan faces are twofold: variability in student teachers’ experiences and no general agreement of what goals and standards should be achieved in professional development in ITE.

Chapter 3: Professional Development in Initial Teacher Education provides an in-depth discussion of the theoretical concept of teachers’ professional expertise. First, it discusses the different ways in which we can understand how student teachers learn to become teachers and the dimensions of knowledge bases that they need to develop and draw upon in making professional judgements. For EFL student teachers, content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge of Shulman’s (1987) seven dimensions of knowledge bases are of particular interest, in addition to their own proficiency in the target language. The chapter concludes by contending that student teachers’ professional development is constructed not only at an individual level but through the dialogical interaction of various constructs.

Chapter 4: Teaching Culture in Japan provides a background on the culture of teaching in Japan. Two salient characteristics...