Re: What's MEXT in English?

jim_breen_at_idontreadhotmail.com
Date: 08/16/04 

Date: 16 Aug 2004 22:43:32 GMT

Jed Rothwell <jedrothwell@earthlink.net> dixit:

> Paul Blay and many others have suggested that
>Japan needs more native speaker instructors. Of course I agree that would be
>a good idea, but there is a limit to how many you can bring in, and after a
>while there should be a limit to how many you need. If Japan were to fire a
>bunch of its present incompetent English teachers, it would probably make
>more progress than it could by hiring an equal number of foreign native
>speakers.

Quite a few years ago Reischauer commented that the big problem with
English teaching in Japan was that few of the 90,000 English teachers
could actually speak English. To that I would add the problem that the
syllabus is more oriented to reading and analyzing English texts than
to speaking and writing (this is of course linked to the skills, or lack
of them, of many of the teachers). 

-- 
Jim Breen        http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/
Computer Science & Software Engineering,
Monash University, VIC 3800, Australia 
$B%8%`!&%V%j!<%s(B@$B%b%J%7%eBg3X(B

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