Finding the Keys to English Language Education and Study in Japan
Saito Yoshifumi
Professor
“English Studies” may sound like an old-fashioned phrase straight out of the Meiji period, but the head of “Saito’s School of English Studies” is now working on a new concept of English Studies for the 21st century. Let’s read Professor Saito’s self-illustrated take on the current situation regarding English education in Japan, as well as of his determination to search for the keys to improving English education amidst the darkness of a reverberating English cacophony.
It has been 40 years since I entered the University of Tokyo as a student. Excluding only five years during which I was working at another university, I have spent my days at either the Hongo or Komaba campuses. The Faculties for which I have worked cover three areas: Letters, Arts and Sciences, and Education. When hearing this, some may think my study area is rather broad and unfocused, but I respond to that by saying that I study English language and literature in the Faculty of Letters, teach English in the College of Arts and Sciences, and both teach and research how to teach English in the Faculty of Education. Does that make it easier to understand?
An art administrator and thinker. To an American who jeeringly asked him, “Are you Chinese, or Japanese, or Javanese,” Okakura famously retorted, “Are you a Yankee, or a donkey, or a monkey?
My primary area of specialization is English Stylistics, which examines the usage of English, with particular regard to literary texts. This area of study, established as a unifying force to link the various research areas in the diversified and segmented fields of language and literature, is interdisciplinary in nature. Speech analysis is another subject considered in English Stylistics, so it can be said that this area of study covers all language-related phenomena. The word “stylistics” makes this discipline sound rather specific, so I sometimes introduce my area simply as “English Studies.” This phrase refers not to practice-oriented English studies as it did in the Meiji period, but to a discipline with much greater breadth.
In the eyes of an individual specializing in the English language such as myself, the current state of English advancement in Japan is the very picture of a terribly unhealthy English frenzy. No matter to what extent foreign language (which, in most cases, is E
In the eyes of an individual specializing in the English language such as myself, the current state of English advancement in Japan is the very picture of a terribly unhealthy English frenzy. No matter to what extent foreign language (which, in most cases, is E