English Teachers with TOEIC Scores of 560? What Has Japan's English Education Actually Been Teaching?

Some time ago, I came across an article that made the following claim:

“The average TOEIC score is 560 for junior high school English teachers and 620 for high school English teachers.”

I do not remember when the survey was conducted or whether those exact figures were correct. But if they were, the finding is quite shocking.

The maximum TOEIC score is 990. Moreover, the standard test covers only listening and reading, not speaking or writing.

Based on my own experience of learning English, I believe that even a score above 900 only marks the point at which someone can begin to communicate reasonably well in English.

And that assumes a native speaker is considerate of the learner’s ability and adjusts their speed and choice of words.

If that is all a score of 900 represents, a score around 600 is severely limiting.

Even before speaking ability enters the picture, listening and reading skills at that level may not be practical.

So what, exactly, are these teachers teaching?

Decoding English Rather Than Understanding It

For many years, English education in Japan focused mainly on grammar and reading comprehension.

English teachers would probably score very highly on grammar questions. Given a dictionary and enough time, they could also interpret complex English sentences accurately.

But real English does not wait.

While someone is speaking, you cannot say, “Please wait a moment while I identify the antecedent of that relative pronoun.”

You need the ability to understand English in English word order and process it as it arrives.

For many years, however, Japanese schools emphasized a method known as “reading backward,” in which English sentences were translated from the end.

Students rearranged English into Japanese word order, analyzed the grammatical structure, and produced polished Japanese translations.

This was less like training students to use English and more like training them to decode English text.

Come to Think of It, Was This Not Just Like Kanbun?

This reminded me of the kanbun classes I took at school.

Kanbun is based on texts written in classical Chinese and is taught in Japan as part of the Japanese-language curriculum. For Western readers, it is roughly comparable to studying classical Latin texts.

In class, students add decoding symbols such as “return marks” to a Chinese text and rearrange it into Japanese word order before reading it.

They do not learn Chinese pronunciation or practice conversation.

Surely no student ever expected kanbun class to teach them how to speak with Chinese people.

Perhaps Japanese English education was based on a similar idea.

Instead of acquiring a foreign language as a foreign language, students converted it into Japanese in order to understand it.

That approach is fine for kanbun because the goal is to read classical texts.

English, however, is a living language still used around the world today.

We cannot mentally add return marks every time someone speaks to us in English.

The Teachers Learned the Same Way

English education has begun to change in recent years.

The Common Test for University Admissions places greater emphasis on listening, while its reading section requires students to process large amounts of English in a short time.

Traditional grammatical analysis alone is not enough to handle it.

But this creates a problem for the teachers themselves.

They also belong to generations educated mainly through grammar and Japanese translation.

They are now expected to teach students English using methods through which they themselves were never taught.

When you think about it, that is an unreasonable demand.

It is like asking someone who passed an exam after reading a textbook about swimming to get into a pool and teach other people how to swim.

The Day Teachers Learn English from Their Students

I still take online English conversation lessons, and they continually remind me that actually using English and understanding its grammar are separate abilities.

Knowing grammar does not guarantee that you can understand someone’s words instantly. Expressing your own thoughts immediately in English is even more difficult.

English education is now beginning to place greater emphasis on practical use.

If that continues, we may see an interesting reversal.

Children will be trained from the beginning to understand English directly as English. Their teachers, meanwhile, grew up learning to understand English by translating it into Japanese.

The children will probably become capable of using English first.

When a teacher struggles to explain something in class, a student may say, “That means this, teacher.”

Scenes like that may eventually become quite common.

For many years, Japan’s English education system mass-produced Japanese people who could not use English.

At last, that system is beginning to change.

But the first people to experience the results may not be the students. They may be the teachers.

After all, they will be facing students with better English than their own every day.