Foreign languages other than English in education and the community

Abstract

We move now from the individual needs of immigrants to the overall position of foreign languages other than English in the language policy landscape. While the role of English will be mentioned where relevant, the main focus of this chapter will be on two other aspects of language provision in the community, namely the teaching and learning of foreign languages other than English in Japanese schools and universities and the provision of multilingual information for foreign residents. Both of these relate to language policy in obvious ways. The aggressive promotion of English downgrades the importance of teaching in schools both those languages which in Japan may properly be considered community languages and other culturally and strategically important foreign languages, and the provision of multilingual information to non-Japanese residents in local communities is in the best interests of both government, community and individual alike. Policy exists to support and to facilitate: in the first part of the chapter, we shall see that the support for English has not been paralleled by support for the teaching of other languages, while in the second, it will become clear that the integration of newcomer residents into local communities has been facilitated by policy decisions taken to provide necessary information in a range of relevant languages. The attention of policy-makers has focused on English to the detriment of the teaching of other languages, which are referred to in passing only at the end of educational policy documents which are titled ‘Gaikokugo’ (foreign languages) but which deal almost exclusively with English. The word ‘gaikokugo’ is thus used in a very narrow sense, denoting in practice only one language. Other foreign languages are referred to as ‘eigo igai no gaikokugo’ (foreign languages other than English), underscoring the priorities of a foreign-language programme in which English is taken as the sine qua non. The working dichotomy is plain to see, as summed up by Fujita-Round and Maher (2008: 93): ‘In the imagined community in which language policy emerges in Japan, two geographical beacons are visible: Japanese (Nihongo) is the (sole) national language (kokugo) and English is pre-eminently the vehicle of internationalization. A straightforward ideological system underpins this stance which, mutatis mutandis, informs large tracts of policy-making at various educational levels.’