抄録
This article focuses on English language education in Finland, which has been attracting a lot of attention of educators worldwide, mainly due to her excellence in the PISA tests for the past decade. The reason we focus on Finland is because Finland has been showing her excellence not only in the PISA tests but also in English language education, which has well been testified by the recent TOEFL data. Its specific aim is to twofold. First, it tries to extract possible reasons for its success in English language education on the basis of the literature review, interviews with stakeholders of English language education, and the knowledge obtained by repeated observations of English lessons at primary and secondary education levels and also by careful observation of the Finnish society in terms of the importance of English. Secondly, the paper will confirm the degree of successfulness of English language education and examine the degree of importance of each extracted reason through interviews and questionnaires against stakeholders. The paper will be concluded with the summary of the obtained results and possible implications for English language education in Japan.
