NEARLY 62 percent of Japan’s second-year junior middle school students say they are weak in English, with 66 percent of them developing this understanding during their first year of middle school, according to the results of a recent survey, The Daily Yomiuri has reported.
The survey of 2,967 second-year students at 33 public schools was conducted in January and February by the Benesse Corporation, an educational service provider in Japan. It suggests that students are most motivated to learn English at the very beginning of their study, with 43.6 percent of them indicating this. However, within a year, the enthusiasm wanes and most students begin to identify themselves as weak in the subject. Out of the 61.8 percent of the students who say they are“rather weak” or “very weak” in the language, 26.6 percent choose “the latter half of the first year” as the period they began feeling that way, followed by “the beginning of the first year”, with 16.2 percent. Nearly 12 percent say they lost confidence “before entering middle school”.
When asked about what they struggled with, 78.6 percent selected “grammar”, while 72.7 percent replied that they “got lower test scores than expected”.
The students were also asked to predict the role English would play in their future. More than 70 percent of them said they felt English would be much more necessary in Japanese society in their adult lives. Only 20.4 percent said they would like to study abroad, while 14.6 percent said they hoped to have a career that would require English skills.
The respondents were second-graders in 2002, the starting year of the current teaching guidelines that allow primary schools to introduce English as an elective course for their students. About 91.4 percent of the second-year middle school students had some English training in primary school, mainly through simple conversation, songs and stories. The main problem, teachers say, is that the benefits gained during primary school disappear rapidly once students move on to middle school, where they are bewildered by the sudden shift from everyday English to textbook English.
