Foreign Language Education in Japan

Language education is a highly contested arenawithin any nation and one that arouses an array of sentiments and identityconflicts. What languages, or what varieties of a language, are to be taughtand learned, and how? By whom, for whom, for what purposes and in whatcontexts? Such questions concern not only policy makers but also teachers,parents, students, as well as businesspeople, politicians, and other socialactors. For Japan, a nation state with ideologies of national identity stronglytied to language, these issues have long been of particular concern. Thisvolume presents the cacophony of voices in the field of language education incontemporary Japan, with its focus on English language education. It exploresthe complex and intricate relationships between the local and the global, and more specifically the links between the levels of policy, educationalinstitutions, classrooms, and the individual.In the much-contested field of foreign languageteaching in Japan, this book takes the reader directly to the places thatreally matter. With the help of expert guides in the fields of anthropology,sociology and linguistics, we are invited to join a vital discussion about thepotentially revolutionary implications of the Japanese government s policy ofteaching Japanese citizens to not only passively engage with written Englishtexts but to actually use English as a means of global communication. RobertAspinall, PhD (Oxford), Professor, Faculty of Economics, Department of SocialSystems, Shiga University, JapanThis insightful book about language educationinvolves different disciplines using ethnographic methods. Both native and non-native speakers of Japanese (or English) collaboratively examine twodifferent types of qualitative approaches in Japan the positivistic and theprocessual. This is a must-have book for researchers and educators of languagewho are interested in not only Japan but also language education generally. Shinji Sato, PhD (Columbia), Director of the Japanese Language Program,Department of East Asian Studies, Princeton University, USA.