Behind the Sand Castle: Implementing English Language Teaching Policies in Japan

Abstract

In the past decades, English language teaching (ELT) policies in Japan have gone through several major revisions. Each time a policy is revised, policy-makers make their best effort to legitimate the new policies and convince general public to accept them. Very often, however, the FLT policies are made and revised without considering actual learning which takes place at schools. The biggest problem is that the policy-makers often jump to a hasty conclusion when a new policy has been proposed.

This chapter discusses several key educational policies related to ELT, established or modified in recent years as examples, and discusses the reactions of academics, mass media, as well as general public in the process of their implementations. A special attention will be paid to the processes and strategies the Japanese policy-makers utilize in order to legitimate policies and the degree of access to information available to each party involved.

The author stresses that policy-makers often attempt to implement policies without careful preparation as though they were building a sand castle at the beach which would easily be washed away soon. Therefore, some suggestions will be made in order for new policies to serve as a solid foundation of ELT in Japan.