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Respect for teachers – Japan at the bottom of the heap
According to a quiz question on Sekai no Hate Made Itte Q (The Quiz Show that Goes to the Ends of the Earth [for answers]) Thailand, Indonesia, Brazil, Turkey, The Philippines and Romania rank first...
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Teaching function words: the cognitive and corpus perspectives
I will be giving a presentation on function words, what we can learn from corpora about them, how we understnad them in light of conceptual metaphor theory and what this all means for second language...
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Introduction of elite language education at Tokyo University
It’s about time such a program was introduced anywhere in Japan. Tokyo University will start streaming some students into an elite language program to groom future global leaders (13 July 2012, Daily...
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20,000 English teachers for Japan by 2019
The Japanese government is planning to increase the number of Assistant Language Teachers (ALTs) to 20,000 by 2019. Although the acronym stands for any language by and large English is the only...
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Do Japanese really need compulsory English?
In today’s Daily Yomiuri there was an article about the results from a survey of 3,225 middle school students on their perception about English. The survey conducted by the National Institute for...
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Big data, Japan and education
I like data. And I like data when it is big. The Ministry of Education, Sports, Culture and Science and Technology (MEXT) in Japan announced that it will promote the use of big data. According to a...
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Don’t blame the computers for poor scores
Recent PISA score (shown in today’s newspaper) from the OECD has shown Japan has dropped from 4th to 8th in the ranking for Reading. A government official was quoted as saying the lower score was due...
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The “hidden” poverty in Japan and its effect on the future
A documentary on tonight’s NHK titled “The Hidden Poverty” said 1-in-6 children are under the living in poverty. Only until recently has the government began surveying this. What makes it hidden is...
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Extracurricular sports in Japanese schools still too much, doing damage to...
1. Did you know in Japan some students formally train everyday for a sport? And they do this for much of their junior and senior years (12-18 years of age). A 10,600 student survey revealed that 20...
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Published international research low by Japanese
Compared to the world growth in publishing at eighty-percent Japan is falling behind at just 14%. Figures given this morning showed exchange to America has fallen from the peak of over 47,000 students...
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