Interview

Kensaku Yoshida

Kensaku Yoshida was born in Kyoto. He is Director of the Center for the Teaching of Foreign Languages in General Education, and a Professor in the Department of English Language and Studies, Sophia University. He is the author of 'J-Talk' (Oxford University Press) and 'Heart to Heart' (Macmillan Language House).

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On Teaching

ELT: Why did you enter the English-teaching profession?
KY: I had already made up my mind to teach English when I was in high school. I belonged to the ESS and I used to help the other members of the club with their English, and I liked it. However, my original intention was to teach in junior high school and not in college. Several of my professors encouraged me to stay on and teach at Sophia. I was told by my advisor that although it would of course be a wonderful thing for me to teach in junior high school, he felt that I could also do a good job training future teachers of English in the university. So that's why I work with teachers so much. That was the reason why I stayed on to teach at the university.

Do you remember the first English class you taught?
Not really. However, in 1974 when I first taught at Sophia, I remember teaching English to Russian majors, and I used a textbook -- annotated by my own professor -- on Jean Jacque Rousseau! It was basically an English to Japanese translation class. It was a very 'traditional' class.

On English in Japan

How has English-language teaching changed in Japan since you entered the profession?
I began studying about foreign language teaching in the late 1960s, and the 'new'way of teaching was still basically 'audio-lingual.' I wrote my B.A. thesis on a contrastive analysis of Japanese and English auxiliary expressions, and my M.A. thesis was on the new 'cognitive approach' which came into existence as a result of the psycholinguistic research following Chomsky's new linguistic theory.

As I mentioned above, I began teaching in the old traditional way. It was the most popular approach to language teaching at that time -- although it still seems to be the case in many schools. Since then, we've gone through the so-called age of methodologies, communicative approaches to language teaching, learner autonomy and learning strategies, and back to the acknowledgement of the importance of the conscious ability to manipulate grammatical rules. However, even with the emphasis being placed once again on knowledge of grammar, the recognition of locals Englishes and learner language shows that 'grammar' does not necessarily refer to the so-called 'native' English grammar which has always been the norm to achieve.

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?
Let me just say that everyone acknowledges the importance of English for Japan in the 21st century. However, there is still much controversy as to how much it should be emphasized. Some people feel that it is important for only a handful of people who will actually be representing Japan in international negotiations, and that English should be an elective subject in school.

Our committee, however, made a distinction between two types of Englishes -- one at the level of everyday conversation and transactions (what in Cummins' terms might be called BICS), and the other, at the level required to conduct cognitively demanding interactions (in Cummins' terms, CALP). The former level of English is something that we feel everyone should be able to attain. We do not want stores, inns, some hotels, as well as boarding houses refusing foreigners simply because they cannot speak English (or other foreign languages). On the other hand, we do not expect everyone to be able to debate and negotiate at international conferences either. In other words, we feel that BICS is something that should be left to compulsory education, while CALP is something that should be kept as an elective subject in our schools.

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