The Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT) revised its new course of study in 2008 with the introduction of English classes at elementary schools from 2011. The new curriculum introduced focuses on speaking and listening skills and recommends the avoidance of reading and writing. This is justified by a suggestion that reading and writing will cause motivational problems among the students and that the inclusion of reading and writing will undermine the junior high curriculum. In Japan, English has been taught through the grammar translation method for many years. The general dissatisfaction with the communicative ability of the Japanese students has also been blamed on the emphasis on grammar and translation. Communicative lessons have been introduced slowly and to varying extent throughout the school system and these lessons tend to be fun, and game based and are not formally tested. This has led to an association between listening/speaking based lessons and high motivation. The motivational problems, therefore, appear to be related to teaching method and the level of language difficulty rather than to the language skills in question. This paper argues that neglecting reading and writing skills could cause greater motivational problems in the long run and create problems for the students with their language development, creating yet a bigger gap between the elementary and junior high curriculums.

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