Abstract
The present paper is the final sequel to ‘ "English Communication I": A Guide to New Textbooks Authorized by the Ministry of Education in Japan’ (March, 2013) and ‘ “English Communication II”: A Guide to New 2014-2017 English Textbooks Authorized by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan’ (March, 2014). The trilogy shows the new contents and tendencies of current English textbooks used at Japanese high schools. Although the name of the subject has been changed from English Reading to Communication English III, the newly published textbooks for the third-year students are just the same in that the highest aim is to acquire the basic reading skills so that they can pass entrance examinations to Japanese universities. Of course, a new kind of activities such as "Make a presentation about the innovator you respect or you are interested in in pairs or groups." and "Tell your classmates about a "lucky" experience you had." are added to the new textbooks, which, however, seems a sheer compromise between Japanese teachers of English and Japan’s Ministry of Education; the former generally believe it more appropriate and essential to teach how to read English, while the latter want to drastically change the traditional, or in their words, "old-fashioned" classroom English and to produce as many fluent English speakers as possible, fearing that the nation will drop out of the severe, international economic competition due to the poor command of the international language, compared with the spiteful, neighboring rivals like South Korea and China, whose people, somehow, appear to have the ability to speak better English.
