抄録
The present paper has been written as a useful guide to new "English Comminication I" textbooks, which are going to be used at high schools and colleges of technology in Japan from April of 2013. These English readers, newly authorized by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, have attracted much attention from not only Japanese teachers of English, but also the general public who has been demanding more effective language education that will quickly and surely enable their children to acquire the ability of speaking English. Apparently, Japan’s Ministry of Education has felt a great deal of responsibility for this serious situation, and has irresponsibly tried thrusting it to the classroom. As a result, most of these new textbooks are filled with much more text and far more activities as well as still more grammar.
Despite the fact that most Japanese people and the Ministry of Education wish to imagine the future Japan where many can speak English fluently, the English Comminication I textbooks in question, strangely enough, have turend out to be little different from the former "English I" textbooks in that the main part is not for speaking, but for reading whose moral topics are familiar to experienced teachers: world peace, equality, environmental problems and so forth.
This paper provides a brief outline of 22 English Comminication I textbooks, showing their characteristics and the contents of every lesson, such as Nelson Mandela, the first black president of South Africa, who made the most of the 1995 Rugby World Cup to unite his newly reborn country, and Tsutomu Yamaguchi (1916-2010), the only human being who was unfortunate enough to experience the atomic bombings both in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but fortunate enough to survive the disasters.
