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Volume
8. Issue 4
Article 3
Title
Transition from learning English to Learning in English: Students’ Perceived Adjustment Difficulties in an English-Medium University in Japan
Authors
Naoko Taguchi and Naeko Naganuma
Bio Data:
Naoko Taguchi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Languages at Carnegie Mellon University. She holds Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from Northern Arizona University. She is currently teaching Japanese and Second Language Acquisition. Her research interests include second language pragmatics, classroom-based research, and foreign language teaching.
Naeko Naganuma is an Associate Professor in EAP Studies at Akita International University in northern Japan. She teaches integrated-skills content-based courses and introduction to computers courses. Her major research interests include Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) and Pragmatics and Second Language Acquisition (SLA).
Abstract
In 2003, the Japanese Ministry of Education officially announced an action plan that aims to produce Japanese citizens who can function effectively in English in international settings. The 2003 Action Plan also corresponds with the on-going reform of higher-education system in Japan. In 2004, all national universities became private entities and gained flexibility in promoting unique education. One notable trend born out of this reform is the establishment of an English-medium university – a university where content courses are taught in English to develop students’ functional ability in English. This case study, conducted in one English-medium university in a prefecture in Japan, examined how Japanese students who graduated from regular Japanese high schools in the prefecture have adapted to a new English-only university environment. The study revealed the students' adjustment difficulties and explored the extent to which the difficulties stem from their previous experience in high school English classes.
Introduction
In 2003, the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT) announced an action plan that aims to produce Japanese citizens who can function effectively in English in international settings (Ministry, 2003a). The 2003 Action Plan presented a set of strategic guidelines to be carried out by the nation as a whole to improve the quality of English education. Improvement of English education is not a new agenda. In 1989, the Japanese Ministry of Education announced a new high school curriculum that emphasized communication skills as a distinct subject area. The 1989 national curriculum, updated in 1999, was an early attempt to develop students’ functional abilities in English in public school settings. The 2003 Action Plan is considered as another symbolic event that represents the nation-wide educational policy that aims to promote functional English ability among Japanese citizens.
The 2003 Action Plan also corresponds with the on-going reform of higher-education system in Japan. In 2004, all public universities became independent administrative corporations and gained flexibility in promoting unique education. One notable incident born out of this reform is the establishment of an English-medium university – a university in which all courses, from language to advanced courses, are taught in English in order to develop students’ functional ability in English. Currently, there are two English-medium colleges and universities in Japan.
This case study, conducted in one English-medium university in a northern prefecture in Japan, examined how Japanese students who graduated from public high schools in the prefecture have adapted to a new English-only university environment. The purpose of the study was to reveal the students' adjustment difficulties and explore the extent to which the difficulties stem from their previous experience in their high school English classes.
Background
English being a required foreign language subject, students in Japan typically receive six years of compulsory English education in junior and senior high schools. Methods and content of English education are shaped by the central government through official curriculum guidelines called the Course of Study, which presents general course objectives, a list of content to be taught, and guidelines for selecting materials.
The late 20th century has witnessed the widespread adoption of communicative language teaching in many English-as-a-foreign language (EFL) countries, and English education in Japan is no exception. Recent English curriculums in the Course of Study (Ministry, 1989) showed a departure from past practices that emphasized grammatical mastery, to a functional, communication-oriented teaching approach and emphasized the development of students’ listening and speaking skills in classrooms. As such, the 1989 Course of Study was a landmark decision in the history of English education because, for the first time, the government officially introduced three Oral Communication courses into high school curriculum. The 1989 curriculum was revised in 1999 in order to promote a more integrated approach to the development of functional English abilities in spoken skills.
Although the goals of the 1989 and 1999 Course of Study were well-disseminated by the central government, questions remain as to whether this curricular reform has produced intended outcome, in terms of improvement of students’ actual communication ability. Abundant research has documented that the university entrance exams and other factors (e.g., limited target language input, large class size, limited communication abilities of teachers) cause difficulty for teachers in implementing the communication-oriented teaching (Brown & Wada, 1998; Gorsuch, 2000, 2001; Koike & Tanaka, 1995; LoCastro, 1996; McGroarty & Taguchi, 2005; Oka & Yoshida, 1997; Pacek, 1996; Sato, 2002; Taguchi, 2002, 2005; Wada, 2002).
Taguchi (2005) combined survey and class observation methods and documented the characteristics of Oral Communication classes in one prefecture. Survey responses from 92 high school English teachers revealed that listening exercises and dialogue practices were most typical classroom activities. Activities for creative expressions and negotiation of meaning, such as speech and role play, received weak responses. Grammar and vocabulary instruction was reported as the third most common activity. These activities were conducted largely in Japanese because 93% of the teachers reported using Japanese as an instructional medium.
Observations of four Oral Communication classes in Taguchi’s study revealed the teacher-centered characteristic in class. The teacher provided most input (48-74% of the class time) and guided activities 100%. Students used speaking skills less than 15% of class time, which was mostly choral repeating of the dialogues. Filling in the missing words in dialogues was the typical listening exercise observed. The time for reading and writing was limited to grammar quizzes. There was also strong instructional emphasis on language structures; between 50% and 90% of the class time was allocated to language form, including reference to grammar and phrasal expressions. Understanding the meaning of isolated phrases seemed to have received emphasis, and little attention was paid to comprehending or producing connected discourse or using English to achieve functions. A translation method was also predominant; teachers often used Japanese to help students to understand vocabulary meaning.
It seems that these teaching practices are influenced by Japanese educational systems such as entrance exams and large class size. Gorsuch’s (2000, 2001) survey study examined how national, school, and classroom variables are related to teachers' approval of communicative activities. The results documented the centrality of college entrance exams; grammar-oriented exams present a well-defined instructional focus and shape teachers' classroom practices in Japan. Sato's (2002) class observation research also reported that teachers seem to follow hidden instructional goals toward exam-oriented English. Due to institutional and social tradition, teachers' grammar-based and translation-based instruction method was found hard to change even after they had training programs on communicative methods, as documented in Pacek's (1996) interview study.
Another educational component, English textbooks authorized by the Ministry of Education, was also found to provide only partial support for development of communicative abilities in Japanese English education. McGroarty and Taguchi (2005) found that most exercises which appeared in a selection of five Oral Communication textbooks were mechanical and structured, including simple comprehension and production of information, and did not provide cognitively complex language activities such as negotiation of meaning or imaginative projection.
As shown above, despite the strong encouragement from the government, previous findings generally confirmed that the communicative approach is difficult for teachers to implement due to various institutional and social reasons, as well as specific beliefs about language teaching that are deeply rooted in local tradition in Japan. The difficulty seems to be a common phenomenon in many EFL countries, such as Korea or China, because of the different underlying educational philosophies between EFL and ESL contexts as well as the deep-rooted grammar-based syllabus used in EFL countries (Burnaby and Sun, 1989; Li, 1998). Li's (1998) case study of 18 Korean teachers of English revealed similar reluctance of the teachers toward implementing communicative teaching methods and introducing changes in the way they teach English, although they showed interest in the communicative approach. As Savignon (2002) observed, implementation of a new pedagogical idea is sensitive to its socio-political contexts, noting that communicative language teaching is an approach that can be used to develop materials and methods appropriate to a given context of learning. Hence, continuous evaluation of the implementation process in local context is necessary in order to identify specific areas of implementation difficulty with the communicative approach, and consequently propose some important implications for the improvement of the current practice.
Although the previous research provided relatively well-formed descriptions about the implementation difficulty of this curricular innovation from teacher perspectives, little research has sought information from students’ perspectives. Previous findings about teachers’ practice imply that, due to the difficulty of implementing the communicative curriculum, communicative competence of Japanese students is underdeveloped, compared with other skill areas (e.g., reading, grammar). However, these claims are only suggestive and not addressed empirically. Very few studies to date have documented students’ perceptions about their transition process from grammar-based mechanical exercises to communicative language activities. As a result, the functional level of students’ ability has rarely been examined. Thus, investigation into students’ actual communication ability, including their potential adaptation difficulties in functional use of English, will help establish a relationship between the national curriculum, actual classroom practice, and outcomes of the practice.
This case study, conducted in one prefecture in Japan, is an attempt to seek such a relationship. The study inquired into the institutional experiences of a group of Japanese students enrolled in an English-medium university located in a local prefecture. It examined how the students who received English education under the Ministry curriculum have adapted to a new university environment in which general and specialized subject areas are taught only in English. Through interviews with individual students, this study aimed to reveal their adjustment difficulties in using English for communicative purposes. It also explored the extent to which the difficulties stem from their previous experience in high school English classes.
The Present Study
This case study was conducted in one English-medium university that opened in April of 2004 in a prefecture located in northern Japan. The section below explains the nature of English-medium universities in general in relation to the recent higher-education reforms, as well as the descriptions of the English-medium university chosen as the research site in this study.
English-Medium Universities and Higher-Education Reforms
The 21st century has brought the swift advance of globalization in countless areas, including technology, economics, and business. Responding to this societal change, the Japanese government has promoted the national agenda of developing human resources that can become competitive in the global society (Ministry, 2003b). In 2002, Atsuko Toyama (the Minister of MEXT) announced the “Human Resource Strategy” in which she emphasized that human resources development should be implemented strategically from compulsory education to higher education and lifelong learning (Ministry, 2002).
One objective in the Human Resource Strategy was the higher-education reform that promotes universities that have unique, marketable characteristics in a society. The higher-education reform has become a pressing business in Japan as observed in the recent privatization of public universities. In 2004, all national universities became independent administrative corporations and gained flexibility in promoting unique education. In an age of declining birthrates and university enrollments in Japan, “survival of public universities depends on how much they can emulate methods of private universities honed through relentless competition,” and offer unique learning environments that attract students (Asahi Newspaper, 2004).
Another objective in the Human Resource Strategy relates to the reform of English education. For children living in the 21st century, it is imperative to acquire communication abilities in English as a common international language. This idea was also incorporated into the 2003 Action Plan as a set of concrete strategies to improve quality of English education (Ministry, 2003a). The Action Plan, announced by the central government in 2004, proposed the teaching of English as a means of practical communication tools (Tanabe, 2004). The budget of 11 hundred million yen (approximately $10 million) approved under the plan was designated to attain those objectives in five years by the means of intensive teacher training, effective assessment methods, and hiring of native speaker instructors.
An English-medium university is one obvious place in which the two human resource goals, higher-education reform and English education reform, are intertwined. It is also a place where three key elements in a global society (foreign language ability, general knowledge, and specialized knowledge) are clearly intertwined. The English-medium university, by definition, is a university in which all college-level courses in basic and advanced education areas, as well as language courses, are taught in English in order to improve academic proficiency in English (The Daily Yomiuri, 2004). English is used for textbooks, course materials, and lectures. The goal of this type of university is to broaden students’ general and specialized knowledge and build professional expertise in English so that they can take leadership in the international arena. In such a university, English is viewed as a tool, not as an end. English is a means for reading, writing, and talking about current issues in content courses. Thus, attained English skills are a by-product of the process of gaining content-area knowledge. In an English-medium university, English is used for truly functional and communicative purposes.
English-medium education is not a Japanese-specific phenomenon. In South Korea, for example, the Ministry of Education recently introduced a curriculum that intends to implement English-only instruction in secondary schools, and the actual implementation methods and outcomes have been of much concern (Dash, 2002). Therefore, the theme of English-medium instruction has wider relevant applications that extend to other Asian classrooms.
The English-medium University in This Study
The university in which this study was conducted was established in order to produce well-educated human resources who are fully competent in English with rich knowledge of the world and global visions. To achieve such goals, the institution offers all the courses in English (except for Japanese and Chinese courses). More than half of the faculty members are non-Japanese from other countries. For the academic year of 2004, about 150 students from 38 different prefectures were admitted in the academic year of 2004.
All new students are required to spend at least one semester in the program of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) that has three levels (i.e., EAP 1, 2, and 3). According to the university brochure, EAP 1 carries students with less than 460 on TOEFL-ITP (Institutional-TOEFL), EAP 2 with between 460 and 480, and EAP with more than 500. A typical EAP class has about 15 students and meets from 18 to 20 hours per week for 7.5 weeks. Since students’ success depends on their ability to function in English in academic settings, the EAP program provides content-based, integrated-skills courses on a variety of subjects such as world history, psychology, and sociology, as well as skill-based courses, such as writing, listening, and computer courses. These classes intend to prepare students for more advanced courses where they are required to listen to lectures, participate in discussions, read extensively, and write academic papers.
Research Questions
The purpose of this case study, conducted in one prefecture in Japan, was to examine students’ transitional processes in English education from the context of high school English classes to the context of an English-medium university. This is a follow-up study of Taguchi (2005) that documented characteristics of high school English classes in the same prefecture in 2002 (see literature review). The present study, conducted in 2004, examined how a group of students who graduated from high schools in the target prefecture have adapted to the English-only university context. Although both high school and university contexts offer an environment for learning English, they differ in the way English is taught, used, and viewed. This study aimed to document those differences and reveal students’ perceptions and coping difficulties that may stem from the differences. The research questions below guided this investigation:
1. What are students’ perceived adjustment difficulties to the English-medium university?
2. In what ways does previous high school experience affect learning experience in the English-medium university?
Methods of the Study
In order to address the research questions, this case study compiled information from interviews with individual students. The interview participants were 13 students who graduated from high schools in the target prefecture and entered the English-medium university in April, 2004 when the university opened. At the time of data collection, there were 30 local students in the university, 7 males and 23 females. Because female students were the majority of the group, in order to control potential response variability coming from gender difference, only the female students were recruited. The students who studied abroad were excluded from the participant pool, which left 20 female students to recruit from. The authors contacted the 20 students and solicited their participation. Out of the 20 students, 13 students came forward to participate voluntarily. They were all first year female students who graduated from local public high schools in the previous year and received English education under the uniformed Ministry curriculum. Their mean age was 18.9, ranging from 18 to 19. When they entered the university, eight of them were placed into EAP 1, four into EAP 2, and one into EAP 3, meaning that 12 out of 13 students had less than 480 TOEFL score at the time of entry to the university. Their TOEFL scores are considered relatively typical for pre-college level students in Japan, because they are equivalent to the pre-second to second grades in the English STEP test (an authorized English certificate exam in Japan), which are also considered pre-college level (Ogawa, 2006).
Interview data was collected after the students had spent two semesters in the university. After the informed consent process, interviews were conducted individually by the authors who were EAP instructors at the university. Each interview session lasted from 30 to 50 minutes in Japanese. The interview questions addressed mainly these two areas:
1) descriptions of previous formal English study, particularly the types of English classes they had in high schools and typical class activities and instructional methods
2) descriptions of their experiences in the new university environment, focusing on:
a) what expectations they had about classes before coming to the university
b) whether the expectations matched the reality, particularly whether any aspects of classes were surprising to them
These questions were expected to address the overarching goal of this study, that is, to document the ways in which previous experience shaped the students’ learning practice and how they influenced their transition process to the new university environment (see Appendix A for the guiding interview questions).
All interview sessions were tape-recorded and analyzed using the strategy of analytic induction (Bogdan & Biklen, 1992; Chi, 1997), based on the data transcribed by the second author. The authors examined the interview data for impressions and trends by noting salient, recurring comments and grouping the comments for similarity. The themes and coding categories emerged from an examination of the data rather than being determined beforehand and imposed on the data.
Results
The sections below provide descriptions of reported influence of high school English classes and resulting adjustment difficulties in two skill areas: spoken skills (i.e., listening and speaking) and written skills (i.e., reading and writing). These descriptions highlight different instructional approaches between high schools and the English-medium university, and how the students have adapted to the new approach.
Perceived Effects of High School Classes on Speaking and Listening Skills
All 13 students reported that listening was the primary source of adjustment difficulty in the English-medium context. They commented that, because the opportunity to listen to authentic English was limited in high schools, understanding teachers’ directions in a university class was the major challenge. Some students reported that the gap between the English they were spoken to in high schools and authentic, naturally spoken English in the university affected their listening comprehension:
1.“English-only classes were hard. When I entered this university I couldn’t comprehend a word in class. Because my high school didn’t provide an English-speaking environment, I still hesitate speaking with teachers in English. I feel nervous.” (K.T., February 9, 2005).6
2. “Like most of typical Japanese high school students, I was not used to listening to natural English. So I could not understand anything in the first class…One of the reasons was that I was able to catch individual words only and had no idea what they meant, but moreover, I was lost when I heard native speakers pronouncing the word I knew because the pronunciation of the word was totally different from what learned before.” (Y.T., February 18, 2005).
Six out of 13 students mentioned that listening opportunity in English was limited in high schools because classes were taught in Japanese.
3. “We didn’t practice any listening in high school. Here (English-medium university) we are learning English in a way that we have never experienced before. In high school, teachers taught English using Japanese, but in this university we are learning English in English.” (M.Y., February 1, 2005).
These students’ comments illustrate that, due to the limited exposure to English in high schools, the students were not prepared in aural skills when they came to the university; they did not have adequate listening ability to follow class instructions in English. Although in the survey responses listening exercises were reported as typical classroom activities by the majority of local teachers, it seems that the aural input that the students received was not in sufficient amount nor authentic.
Similar to the listening skill, the students reported that the lack of speaking practice in high schools affected their adjustment to the English-medium university environment. Eight out of 13 students commented that communicating only in English was one of the difficulties they had to overcome because they had almost no experience in speaking in English in high schools:
4. “I don’t recall we had any conversation in English…We did not do any speaking. We only used English to play games with the ALT (i.e., native-speaker assistant language teachers). We had classes with the ALT only in the first grade. We spoke some words in English with ALTs, but we didn’t have a conversation in English at all. (A.K., February 24, 2005).
Some students reported that, in their high school English classes, they mainly read aloud written conversations in pairs or repeating dialogues after a teacher. Very little time was spent on using English in a creative manner to express their own opinions or thoughts:
5. “In class, we sometimes practiced oral paraphrasing, but basically we only practiced reading aloud written texts…I wish I had more time to practice daily expressions.” (K.T., February 9, 2005).
6. “In the OC class, we repeated after the teacher sentence by sentence. Sometimes, we practiced reading sentences orally in pairs…So it was not enjoyable at all…I had no chance to give my own opinions or ideas in English.” (Y.S., February 24, 2005).
Perceived Effects of High School Classes on Reading and Writing Skills
Twelve out of 13 students reported difficulties in adjusting to the amount of reading assignments in the English-medium university. They unanimously reported that they were initially shocked with the massive amount of reading assignments that they had to complete on a daily basis. Reading was typically assigned from content-based, pre-college level textbooks used by native speakers in U.S. high schools over a variety of academic subjects. For instance, the world history textbook that some of the interview participants used (Glencoe World History, Spielvogel, 2002) was a 981-page textbook including 32 chapters. Although only about 20% of the textbook was covered in a 15-week semester, students usually received 20-30 pages of reading assignment per week. The students reported that most days they spent hours in the library looking up unfamiliar vocabulary and responding to the comprehension questions assigned for each reading.
7. “Completing homework every day took a lot of time at the beginning because the quantity of reading was large…When I was in high school, I was able to read perfectly because each text was short. I was reading for sentences and didn’t think about which part of the text was important. Now I try to get the gist of the text and summarize content next to the sentences or on separate notes.” (M.Y., February 1, 2005).
In response to the question, what took them so long to complete the reading assignment, eight students pointed out their word-for-word translation habit that they acquired in high school English classes. Typical class activities in high schools involved checking the meaning of English words in Japanese and translating each sentence according to their teachers’ grammar explanations. This translation practice discouraged the students from processing texts directly in English, consequently affecting the timely completion of reading assignments. Some students reported:
8. “When I was in high school, emphasis was placed on accurate and precise translation of each sentence, rather than comprehension of the gist of the text.” (A.Y., February 3, 2005).
9. “Understanding the content of texts was hard, because the texts were not written for Japanese learners. There were many unfamiliar expressions, most of which were not listed in the dictionary…it took me some time to acquire a strategy - a strategy of comprehending meaning using contextual cues.” (M.S., January 25, 2005).
10. “What was not so useful in high school classes was the method of reading. After I came here (the English-medium university), I realized that it’s not efficient to read sentence-by-sentence. Reading texts took a lot of time initially because I was reading them by breaking a sentence into individual structural units in order to understand meaning accurately…Different from high school classes, teachers here encourage students to skip unknown words and get overall outline of a text.” (T.N., February 18, 2005).
These interview responses revealed a difference in reading instruction between high school and university English classes. In high schools, the students were trained to understand every single word in a sentence, as well as grammatical structures within a sentence. Speed of reading was de-emphasized in classroom instruction. Instead, accurate, precise translation of structural units in sentences received much emphasis. Due to this bottom-up reading habit, the students faced a new challenge in the university, as they had to read a large amount of text quickly and efficiently. While coping with everyday homework assignments, the students gradually acquired a set of new reading strategies – skipping unknown vocabulary, reading for the main idea, and making inferences using contextual information. These top-down reading strategies helped students to develop reading speed. The students seemed to have learned that reading is a process of understanding overall meaning of connected discourse, not isolated phrases or sentences.
Treating text as a discourse rather than a set of isolated sentences also revealed itself as an adjustment problem in the area of writing. Ten out of 13 students reported that they had difficulty in producing a paragraph-level discourse because of their previous experiences in translating sentence-by-sentence from Japanese to English when writing.
11. “I didn’t do writing in high school. The only writing we did was to fill in missing information in sentences. We did nothing other than that.” (Y.S., February 24, 2005).
12. “We did a limited range of writing in high school. For example, after studying how to make a tag question, we practiced writing sentences with a tag question only. I wrote only one sentence based on a Japanese sentence, and each of the sentences was not connected at all, so it was not so useful.” (A.M., January 19, 2005).
These translation practices received much emphasis in high schools due to the necessity to prepare for grammar-based college entrance exams. Seven students reported that in high schools the focus was placed on preparing for the exams. They said that, although the exam preparation provided them with a strong grammatical and vocabulary background, translation training did not help them to prepare for the kind of writing required in the English-medium university:
13. “When I was in the third year of high school, I studied only for the entrance examinations. There seemed to be only one answer for a question. Studying for entrance examinations was painful. I did not like being forced to have only one answer for each question when we translated from English to Japanese or from Japanese to English.” (H.T., February 21, 2005).
In the English-medium university, the students were introduced to the academic writing course in the second level of the EAP program. In the writing course they were taught how to write an essay, how to formulate a thesis statement, how to develop support for the thesis, and how to organize paragraphs according to their argument. The students typically produced a two- to three-page essay in the writing course (personal communication with course instructors, 2004). The essay tasks were also cognitively demanding (e.g., reading a text and writing a response essay). These experiences were new to many of the students interviewed:
14. “Writing homework was tough because I had never produced long sentences. I didn’t know how to write…I didn’t know how to organize…When I was in high school I translated short Japanese sentences into English. The content of writing didn’t matter. So when I entered this university, I tried to translate Japanese concepts into English sentences, but I couldn’t express my ideas well. Whenever I tried to translate, I felt something was not right, that’s not what I wanted to say. After about six months, when I entered EAP level 3, I started writing directly in English, because I became able to think in English, without using Japanese, after being in class for a while.” (M.S., January 25, 2005).
15. “I was keeping a journal when I was in EAP level 1. Writing even one page took a long time. I used a dictionary a lot. But now I can write fluently without dictionaries. My writing speed became faster. Before I was translating from Japanese to English, but now I try to think in English. If I think in Japanese first and change it to English, ideas sound awkward, and expressions become confusing. Simple sentences are easier to comprehend for readers, compared with complex ones.” (K.T., February 9, 2005).
As demonstrated in the comments above, the students initially used Japanese as a medium of writing in English; they generated ideas in Japanese and tried to convert them into English. However, they soon realized that translated expressions did not sound natural or did not adequately represent what they wanted to say. It seems that this internal awareness partially originated in the transition process from writing for translation to writing for expression of one’s own thoughts and ideas. When students were translating sentences in high school, they translated someone else’s ideas and thoughts that pre-existed in the text. Therefore, their job was merely to replace Japanese words with their English equivalents by using a Japanese-English dictionary. However, in the English-medium university, because they have to translate their thoughts and ideas into English, they have a great personal involvement with the choice of words and phrases. They search for the precise expressions that could represent their ideas, and critically evaluate whether the expressions are appropriate in conveying the meaning that they have created. This self-reflection process seems to extend from the word and phrase level to the sentence and paragraph level:
16. “After I entered EAP level 2, I learned how to order things in writing, like placing the thesis statement at the beginning. I also learned that readers get confused if I elaborate too much…So I tried to identify the redundant parts and simplify sentences…By doing this I became able to judge which sentences are good, and which ones are unnecessary and should be eliminated.” (Y.S., February 24, 2005).
Through these processes, the students seemed to have realized that writing is a meaning-producing process, not a process of practicing grammatical structures learned from textbooks:
17. “When I was in high school, there was impression that we had to translate exactly in accordance to grammar, but here in this university, the important thing is to convey what we think. It’s okay if we can get our meaning across, even if our grammar is a little bit wrong.” (M.Y., February 1, 2005).
18. “It was hard for me to write an essay because I didn’t have any experience. In Mr. B’s class, I was surprised to learn that we had to write based on what we think, not based on what the textbook says. I wasn’t used to it. But once I got used to it, writing became fun.” (H.T., February 21, 2005).
Summary and Discussion
This case study conducted in one prefecture in Japan investigated students' perceived adjustment difficulties in the learning environment where content courses are taught only in English. The study explored the extent to which the difficulties stemmed from their previous experience in high school English classes. Although interpretations of the results require caution due to the small amount of data, the results revealed that high school English classes had some impact in shaping students’ learning practice. Taguchi’s (2005) study conducted in the same prefecture revealed a profound use of mechanical activities in grammar and vocabulary instruction in high schools. Activities that could promote creative expression were not reported as typical activities, and spoken skills were not assessed regularly in class. Teachers also reported using Japanese in the majority of class time. Class observations revealed that teachers took full control of instruction and emphasized an exact understanding of every word and phrase and focused on discrete grammar structures rather than connected discourse in their instruction.
These high school practices seemed to have affected the students’ adjustment to the new learning context where English is used as a tool to produce discourse and communicate meaning. Although the students provided positive comments on high school instruction (i.e., providing strong grammatical and vocabulary knowledge), they also felt that the translation habit discouraged them from processing texts directly in English, consequently affecting the timely completion of reading assignments. In addition, because of the translation habit, the students struggled with expressing ideas in English spontaneously. When writing, they experienced a difficulty in thinking in English and locating the right expressions to symbolize their thoughts. Furthermore, due to little exposure to authentic English in high schools, instructors’ directions were too difficult to follow. As a result, the students found themselves at a loss in an English-only classroom.
These findings suggest a need to further explore the types of high school English instruction needed to prepare students for the education offered by an English-medium university. In an English-medium university, English is used as a tool to understand, discuss, and reflect on various issues in general and specialized subject areas. English is viewed as a means to achieve functions, providing students with ability to acquire knowledge, exchange ideas with peers to deepen the knowledge, and internalize the knowledge through critical reflection and application. English skills required to perform these functions are inevitably complex and demanding. They require students to become able to read extended text for the gist, develop logical, coherent, and precise argument in writing, comprehend a stream of English input in real time, and respond to the input in a spontaneous manner during discussion. These views sharply contrast with how English is studied in high schools. Because English is viewed as an academic subject that consists of a set of discrete structures to memorize, not as a set of skills, the high schools examined in this study did not seem to prepare students adequately for the types of skills they would need in the English-medium university environment.
The recent nation-wide reforms promoted by the central government aim at producing a next generation of Japanese citizens who can function effectively in English in international settings. To achieve this goal, various educational policies put forth by the government, including the Human Resources Strategies, the 2003 Action Plans, and national curriculum guidelines, all intend to improve functional communicative English abilities among Japanese students. Findings gleaned from this study did not provide full support for the effectiveness of the educational policies, as exemplified in the students’ adjustment difficulties in using English for functional purposes. Because it is possible that English-medium universities indeed offer an optimal environment to enhance students’ functional abilities, methods and content of high school English education could be modified in a way that will prepare students for such an environment where English is used for truly communicative purposes. A smooth transition from a high school to a university context could serve as an indication of successful implementation of the educational reforms. Students’ adjustment difficulties and strategies they developed to overcome those difficulties gleaned from this study provide important insights as to what aspects of high school education need improvement and how they should be improved.
While the findings in this study suggest that the current high school settings may not provide an optimal language learning environment, several attempts have been made in the target prefecture to assist students’ adjustment to the English-medium university. One such attempt is the intensive teacher training program provided by the EAP faculty members. Following the MEXT guidelines, the university is committed to provide pedagogy workshops to all public school English teachers within a five-year period. Since the workshops are conducted 100% in English, the local teachers can understand what types of English skills are needed to survive in an English-only environment. The teacher education program could facilitate communication between university faculty and local English teachers so that they can collaboratively explore the ways to develop students’ functional English abilities at college and pre-college levels.
In addition to the teacher education, orientation programs for incoming students could also assist students’ adjustment process. The English-medium university studied here regularly provides a series of orientation sessions to newly admitted students before academic semesters begin. The three- to four-day orientation program introduces students to the EAP program and prepares students for a variety of study skills and learning strategies which are necessary to function in academic classes. Informal post-program survey results have indicated students’ appreciation of the orientation program and potential effectiveness of the program to assist their adjustment.
Conclusion and Implications for Future Research
This study documented student difficulties in adjusting to a new English-only environment and focused on the skill areas and classroom activities or tasks that they felt were difficult to cope with. The interview data reported here provided a starting point for describing the communicative difficulties that the students experience in the university context. However, due to the small amount of data collected from self-report interviews, this study is exploratory, and thus there is a need for a larger longitudinal study. In addition, the data reported in this study are not sufficient to establish a causal relationship between high school English experience and students’ adjustment difficulties. Although the study revealed some potential influence, more data needs to be collected systematically in order to explore the causal relationship.
In addition, the present findings are limited to the students’ reported adjustment problems and concerns. By design, this study did not reveal the process of their adjustment, that is, the process of their academic socialization. Transition from one learning context to another requires students to make tremendous adaptation, because it is a process of undoing old habits and acquiring new habits. Old behaviors and beliefs need to be modified over time for a successful transition to occur. Thus, a longitudinal in-depth analysis of the students’ adaptation process, compiled with actual observations of their behaviors, is necessary in order to reveal how they negotiated their identities, participation, and membership in their new learning community. Such analysis will tell us in more depth about the actual strategies that the students used when shifting from the context of learning English to the context of learning-in-English.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Mr. David Weaver for proof-reading an early version of the manuscript. Our thanks also goes to the anonymous reviewers of Asian EFL Journal for their useful comments.
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Appendix A: Interview Questions (Translated into English)
1. Name
2. Age
3. The name of the high school you graduated from
4. Describe previous experiences of studying English (e.g., cram school, study abroad, etc.) in addition to junior and senior high school English classes, if any.
5. Reason(s) why you wanted to attend the English-medium university
6. Future goal(s)
7. Describe experiences and/or incidents that you were surprised at related to your study at the university
8. Were you interested in “studying English” in high school? Why? Why not?
9. What kinds of English classes did you have in high school?
10. Describe the English classes you had in high school.
11. (1) Do you think your English skills have improved since you came to the university?
(2) If so, what kinds of skills do you think you have improved?
(3) Why do you think you have improved such skills?
(4) How can you tell that you have improved such skills?
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