Comparing Teacher-Student Interactions in Content Classrooms in a Japanese University

要旨

The recent impact of globalization has promoted reformation in the Japanese English education. Instead of focusing on receptive skills, productive skills including speaking, pragmatic, and strategic competences have been promoted. The Japanese educational institutions are currently trying to improve the communicative competence of students, and universities started to offer departmental-academic classes in English. The purposes of the classes are to improve the communicative abilities of students and to attract international students. According to the survey by the government, one third of Japanese universities conduct some types of content classes in English (MEXT, 2010). As a result, not only Native English Speaking Content Specialists (NESCS) who are engaged in teaching content and possess degree related to the field, but also Japanese Content Specialists (JCS) and Native English Speaking Teachers (NEST) who are language teachers have been involved in teaching academic content classes in English. The responsibility of JCSs and NESTs for teaching content classes in English will increase since human resources are limited. The characteristics of the teacher-student interactions are different between regular English classrooms and content classes in English (Allen et al., 1990; Huang, 2011; Musumeci, 1996; Shah, 2003). The usefulness of teaching subjects in English is that the class can improve motivation of the students, include more authentic language, and positively influence the outcome of English abilities of students. Nonetheless, offering this type of classes contains a number of challenges such as lack of training for the teachers and selection of materials. Thus, there is a claim which says the content approach is not well-implemented in EFL settings. However, not enough research has been done in relation to teacher-student interactions in Japanese content classrooms. Moreover, little research has targeted JCS who teach content classes in English.

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