Cultivating communicative ability and textbooks

In Japan, students begin to learn a foreign language at lower secondary school as an elective subject at the age of twelve according to the provisions of the Ministry of Education. Foreign languages from which students can choose include English, French, German and others. Nevertheless, almost all students in lower and upper secondary schools elect to study English as a foreign language. The Ministry of Education revised the Course of Study, or national standards for school curricula, in 1987. This version has placed the emphasis on cultivating the communicative ability of students and on fostering a positive attitude towards international understanding in the foreign language classroom at lower and upper secondary levels. In spite of this, however, most students still have great difficulty in communicating fluently with English speaking people. The seminal question is why these objectives of foreign language study (specifically English language study) are not attained with satisfactory results. There has been disagreement about the effects and purposes of English learning at school. Some say English learning at school is a waste of time and is useless unless the students can develop communicative abilities in English. On the other hand, others claim that the aim of English education at school is to enable students to understand English printed matter so that they can receive information from foreign countries through print in order to enhance their own culture. This paper discusses briefly the history of English language learning from the beginning of the Meiji period to the present. It then describes the process of how the Course of Study is determined. The Course of Study contains a broad description of general goals for every school subject in lower and upper secondary schools in Japan. It also lays out national trends and overall aims of English education at the middle school level. This paper focuses on three English textbooks currently in use in lower secondary schools and analyzes their framework to find out how the aim of cultivating the communicative ability of students can be attained by their use