Japan’s 15-year-olds can’t string a sentence in English together. Is rote learning to blame?
- Some 1 million students failed a series of spoken questions in English, despite the government making changes in 2021 to improve verbal skills
- Some say the tests were too hard, while others blame rote learning, online classes during Covid and lack of practice as reasons for poor performance
Plummeting scores in English-language tests among Japanese lower secondary school students have triggered concern that future generations will be unable to communicate in the world’s lingua franca.
In nationwide tests conducted in April, just 12.4 per cent of 15-year-olds were able to reply correctly to five spoken questions in English. One required them to listen to a 30-second presentation about using reusable bags when shopping, instead of plastic bags, then giving their thoughts on the issue.
The last time the oral test was conducted, in 2019 – delayed since then due to Covid and with changes to how tests were conducted – the figure for answering the five questions correctly was 30.8 per cent.
Alarmingly, more than 60 per cent of the 1.9 million students who took the test failed all five questions.
When tested on their reading, writing and listening abilities, the students – quizzed in their last year of junior high school – gave correct answers 46.1 per cent of the time, down 10.4 percentage points from the previous test.