Abstract
This study aims at revealing when and how English language teaching in junior high schools in the post-war era shifted from an elective subject to a de facto compulsory one, and examining what factors have caused this. Based on this examination, this study exemplifies how a specific type of curriculum has developed into one component of “national education” (this term is intended to indicate a type of education which people self-evidently presume to bestow on all students in their nation).
In 1947, when a new educational system began, English language teaching in junior high school started as an elective subject; i. e., at that time, it was not expected that all students would study English. This was deemed as democratic because it signified that every student could choose whether or not to study the language based on his or her own needs and interests. In the 1950s, however, the percentage of first-year students who studied English approximated 100％. This indicates that the situation where all junior high school students have experienced at least one year of English learning emerged in this decade, and therefore the 1950s is considered as the beginning of English as a de facto compulsory subject. In the 1960s almost 100％ of third-year students came to study English, suggesting that the current situation in which every student studies English for three years was established in this period.
The factors affecting the establishment of English as a de facto compulsory subject are found to be a variety of social and educational changes rather than dynamics directly relevant to the subject. This study demonstrates that neither the increasing necessity of English language nor English language teachers' action to make the subject a compulsory one is a good explanation for the increasing percentages of the students who studied English in the 1950s and the 1960s. Rather the establishment of English as a de facto compulsory subject was revealed to have been led by social and structural changes such as the introduction of an English language assessment for senior high school entrance examinations (almost on a nationwide scale from 1958), an increasing ratio of students advancing to high schools, and an improvement in the student-teacher ratio after the graduation of the “baby-boom” generation. In addition, a certain type of English language teachers' discourse also played an important role in establishing English as a de facto compulsory subject. At the beginning of the post-war era, because there was little necessity to use English in Japanese society, English language teachers were obliged to deal with a dilemma created by the idea of social needs, a central idea of the post-war education philosophy. They proposed the significance of “cultivation” (kyoyo) and “the essence of language learning” (gengo no honshitsu) as a counter-discourse against the idea of the social needs of English. This discursive practice resolved the dilemma,legitimatized English as a component of “national education,” and successfully shifted the subject to a compulsory one. By analyzing these factors, this study illustrates that the complex functions of a variety of social and educational factors have resulted in generating a specific type of “national education.”
