The learning of English at academic high schools in Japan: students caught between exams and internationalisation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Focusing on Japanese high school students studying English as a main school subject at university-preparatory high schools in Japan, this study employed a context-based perspective to examine those students' perceptions about English study embedded in the Japanese social and educational context. A semi-structured questionnaire was administered to 66 Japanese university-bound high school students. The study found that the pervasive association of English with internationalisation in Japanese society helps Japanese academic students to develop an orientation to communicate with native speakers of English and ‘foreigners’ in general. This study argues that students' integrative and outward orientation is complicated by exam-oriented English classes nearly devoid of communicative activities and by Japanese society outside school, which, on the one hand, favours ‘English for international communication,’ yet on the other hand, lacks any practical need for such English. It was found from students' responses to the questionnaire that complex attitudes to EFL in Japan are matched by a distinction in Japanese students' perceptions between learning English at school specifically for university entrance examinations and their broader notions of ‘English for international communication.’ For example, some students saw no linkage between what they were currently learning and English for communication. It was also revealed that some students believed that novice-level, broken English would do for communication in English overseas and had already decided to discontinue English study after graduation from high school. Pedagogical implications for non-native EFL teachers are also discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".