Abstract
Through three interviews with students and my teaching during the spring semester in 2010, I asked myself how Japanese English teachers perceive their roles and how they practise them in the EFL classroom; it has been found that they tend to lecture most of the class hour, turning their students into pure listeners and recipients. Japanese university learners of English seem to have grown used to being silently spoonfed, memorizing what the teacher has said or written on the blackboard and having very little chance to use the target language themselves. My aims for this paper are to find how Japanese English teachers perceive their roles and duties or functions and to learn how much of the time they practise them, using the quantitative method of questionnaires. This study is based on responses from 78 Japanese English teachers at universities and high schools. The data were analysed by using the t-test (an independent sample) on responses to Questions 6 & 7 from these teachers. The three roles in Question 6 –“Security”,“ Feedback” and“ Discipline”‒ have significant differences and the five roles in Question 7 -“Diagnosing”“, Encouraging”“, Explaining”“, Observing” and“ Assessing”‒ show significant differences between the two groups.
