The blogging equivalent of the advent calendar

In an attempt to bring some much needed numerical respectability to this year's blog post count, I have decided to try and write something every day leading up to Christmas. As I didn't post anything yesterday, December 1st, I have technically already failed in this endeavour, but that's not my fault. I had to go to Sapporo yesterday for an all day series of presentations on teaching English in primary school. Yes, I know I work in a university but given the English ability of some of my students many of the presentations were quite apt. Plus teaching English to young learners here in Japan is the subject of my by now epic 4-years-in-the-making PhD dissertation. It is a topic that is receiving an increasing amount of attention here in Japan (and elsewhere in Asia) as the widespread belief amongst both parents and politicians is that English is essential for children's / the nation's future. The problem is that securing such a future involves a lot of work, particularly in relation to reforming the current English curriculum away from an exam-based methodology to something more communicative. A further impediment is the lack of trained and experienced English teachers at the primary level. Now, neither of these problems are insurmountable but facile 'tinkering' rather than much needed 'root and branch reform' tends to be the political order of the day. This gives rise to some very pedagogically suspect practices in the classroom. For instance, English education, or rather a diluted form of it, begins in 5th class in primary school. However, students are not given any literacy instruction nor are they formally assessed in the subject. That only begins in the secondary school. The result is lots of aimless 'awareness-raising' games and activities with the happy-clappy, touch-feely intention of making students 'like' English, as opposed to say, using the same time more constructively in actually learning the language. There are a number of reasons for this bizarre situation, particularly the aforementioned lack of qualified teachers, but there is also an underlying fear of what learning English might do to students' Japanese language ability. Japan, like Ireland (and apologies to all you Gaelgoirs out there but admit it, there's not many of you) is a resolutely monolingual society (or at least likes to think of itself as such whilst conveniently ignoring the various ethnic minorities living here). With no real historical (or even contemporary) tradition of bilingualism there is a widespread conception that learning additional languages is a zero sum game, i.e. there is only so much room in the brain for language learning and the more languages you learn the less brain space there is to go around. So while the country as a whole recognises the need for learning English, people are not too comfortable committing fully to learning the language for fear of what it may do to the Japanese language. I like to point out to the students in my classes at the university that if looked at from a global perspective, monolingual speakers are the exception; the rule is usually bilingual or trilingual speakers. But I usually loose them at the word 'global' with that tricky 'l' and 'b' sound combination.