How Will Reading Instruction Be affected under the Next Course of Study for Senior High School Foreign Languages?

Abstract

The next Course of Study for Senior High School Foreign Languages (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science & Technology, hereafter MEXT, 2010) clearly aims at fostering students’ communicative abilities of English. Seeking to achieve this aim with integrated skills tasks in “classes with real communication scenes” (MEXT, 2011) it will transform Writing into English Expression courses to improve students’ speaking and writing proficiencies, while the Reading course will disappear. This paper tries to explore how reading instruction will be affected under the next Course of Study, conducting two studies based on Grabe’s (2009) comprehensive suggestions on reading instruction. The first study compares guidelines of the present Reading and new English Communication I / II courses concerning reading instruction. The second pilot study examines how reading and integrated skills tasks will be conducted in the MEXTauthorized course books of English Communication I. The results are: (a) the guidelines of Reading and English Communication I / II courses are basically similar; and (b) English Communication I course will have the following characteristics: its reading skills tasks center around vocabulary, grammar and comprehension, not paying much attention to fluency, and it is without enough integrated skills tasks. Implications for reading instruction under the next guidelines are also shown.