Interview
Kumiko Torikai
Kumiko Torikai is the Director of the English Language Program at
Rikkyo
University and has been a professor at the university since 1997. A graduate of
Sophia University and Columbia University, Torikai has over 30 years experience as
an interpreter and interviewer.
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On English in Japan
ELT: How did you learn English and when did you decide that teaching English would
be your career?
KT: Basically I learned it in Japan, just as any other Japanese, at a private high school
in Tokyo, plus trying different things on my own, such as reading or watching movies in
English, participating in English speech contests or dramas. As for overseas experience, I
spent one year in the United States as an AFS (American Field Service) exchange student
while I was a senior in high school. I thought about teaching English about 15 years ago,
when I took a break from my interpreting/TV interviewer career to raise my children. I
started to think about it seriously when I was offered a position to teach at a new 4-year
university.
Why do the Japanese need to speak English?
I doubt if all the people in Japan have the need to speak it daily, but it is true that a
certain percentage of our population do need to use it as a de facto lingua franca. You
cannot deny the fact that English has become a global language, and will probably remain
as a means for international communication in the foreseeable future. In digital world of
Internet and email, you may not have to speak it orally, but you certainly have to be able
to read and write English. It is also true that if you know English, it is easier to get
information, to widen your perspectives and also it's more fun!
You are a member of the special advisory committee to the Ministry of Education on
education reform. From the monthly meetings was a consensus reached on the status of
English in Japan?
One thing we agreed on was to consider English language education holistically, integrating
all levels of teaching. At present, English is taught at different levels, at high schools
and colleges, without any effort to give it coherence and continuity. In other words, people
in the ELT field are doing what they feel is the right thing, but there is as yet any effort
to review the whole picture in terms of cohesion, which is counterproductive and would not
produce tangible results. The committee will hopefully come up with some specific suggestion
as to what should be done in each level to attain some goals that would also have to be
discussed further.
On Japanese Students
Why do you think Japanese students have such low TOEFL scores when compared to
other test-takers in Asia?
The answer is twofold:
First and foremost, the number of people who take TOEFL in Japan far exceeds any country
in Asia. TOEFL, as we all know, is a standard test to assess the language ability for the
purpose of study at colleges in North America. In Japan, not only people who are interested
in studying abroad, but people who are interested in English tend to take it just to see how
they score. If the number of applicants becomes big, it is not surprising that the average
score goes down.
Secondly, and perhaps more important, is that the Japanese test-takers tend to score low in
the last section of TOEFL, the reading portion. This may sound like news to many people when
it is almost taken for granted that the Japanese learners are good at reading but not in
speaking. You cannot judge speaking in TOEFL, so we are discussing here which of the three
sections Japanese are not good at.
Among the three parts, listening, grammar and reading, the Japanese learners seem to have
difficulty in reading, or they do not perform as well as they should, chiefly because they
are too slow in reading in English, not having received proper training in reading strategies.
Most of the time, the reading that is taught at school is bottom-up reading, analyzing
sentences with the help of dictionaries, consulting every single word that is new or unknown.
What the Japanese learners need is top-down reading, to enable them to read faster and more
efficiently. Some cram schools have started teaching rapid reading/speed reading, and in some
universities, courses are offered to teach top-down reading. For example, at Rikkyo University,
we have just completed video/textbook materials called "Information, Please!" and
"More Information, Please!" (both published by Shouhaku-sha,) to teach top-down
reading, in our twice-a-week Reading and Listening course, taught in language labs.
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