Effect of Learning English as a Foreign Language in Japan : A Starting Point, Goal, and What Should Happen In-Between

The purpose of this review article is to argue that English education in Japan needs to be more systematic, based on the communicative and cognitive development of learners in their mother tongue, i.e. Japanese. Since a majority of Japanese learn English sometime after they start acquiring Japanese, we need to make decisions on WHEN and HOW our children begin their learning of English. Because of the recent introduction of English at the elementary school level, supported by "critical period hypothesis," people tend to believe this "starting point" should be as early as possible. However, we must carefully examine and evaluate the effect of such early introduction of a foreign language in a homogeneous linguistic environment like Japan. In this paper, I argue that it is most important to guarantee our children access to more intimate and communicative input in their first language. Studies on bilingualism show that L2 development seldom exceeds that of L1. Therefore, we should have a systematic approach to the starting point and goal in the learning of English if we are to set our achievement goal of English education as "communicatively and intellectually functional in all four skill areas: listening, speaking, reading, and writing." We should not be too worried about the age at which children start learning but rather should have young learners accumulate appropriate and coherent learning experience at each grade level, taking a longitudinal viewpoint