2023 年 43 巻 1 号 p. 31-40
The teaching guidelines authorised by the Ministry of Education have seen two major shifts regarding the model variety in the policy and practice of English language teaching (ELT) in Japan: withdrawal from the exclusive orientation to UK/US English in 1977; and fostering awareness of the tenets of World Englishes (WEs) and English as a lingua franca (ELF) since the turn of the century. The objective of this research is to look for a possible change in the attitudes of university students towards varieties of English due to these paradigm shifts. A questionnaire was distributed to advanced-level ESL learners enrolled in a liberal arts-based department that had English as a medium of instruction. The results revealed that the overwhelming favouritism towards US English lingers, despite the learners’ first-hand use of ELF and ample exposure to WEs in academic settings. The background factors for this predilection for US English include its extensive use in ELT materials and in popular-culture contents, whereas a small-scale preference for ‘lesser-known’ varieties of English, whether in the Inner or Expanding Circle, is assumed to have been developed through personal interactions with speakers of those varieties. ELT policy making should take into account what model ‘WEs/ELF-aware’ learners wish to aim at and the underlying reasons for their motivation.
