Follow up to 'Try free open-source run-anywhere software'

In follow up to some of the suggested software

1. You can run Google Docs offline -- integrated onto a desktop and within your browser program (an advanced form of Firefox or Explorer) -- if you download Google 'Gears'.

http://gears.google.com/

2. Using the new Google Docs templates can speed up using Google Docs as a word processor or presentation program to create files with heavier formatting.

http://docs.google.com/templates

Try free open-source run-anywhere software

Why use expensive commercial 'bloatware' (which locks you into an endless cycle of planned obsolescence at your expense) when so much free, open-source software is now available? Much of it even runs on Windows, although much of the software emerged from open source communities and companies that backed open source (at least in some forms).

The portable applications, such as Lupo PenSuite and PortableApps will run on the hard drive of your computer (without creating hard-to-uninstall files and registry artifacts), but you can also run them from a portable pen drive or other such memory device (SD card, Memory Stick, attached external hard drive, etc.). There are other products and online services available in addition to the ones listed here, but, except for the last entry on the list ('Other'), I am only including ones that I have downloaded and am using now.

It is not just that expensive proprietary software is being challenged by cheaper and even free rivals. It's that desktop computing and office functions, like DTP and word processing, are now being ingeniously adapted to ubiquitous computing and the new Web (Web 2.0). What I like about much of the software listed below is that, not only is it free, but I can run it on all my computers and on any computer that I use (such as at an internet cafe when I travel), with or without an internet connection (except Google Docs and PicasaWeb , which are a web-based word processor and photo album, respectively).


I. Lupo PenSuite
http://www.lupopensuite.com/

This is a whole set of portable programs (you can run them from your chosen type of plug-in memory, such as an SD card, Memory Stick, or Pen Drive), and it is available in both full and light versions.

Download here:
http://www.lupopensuite.com/suite.htm


The suite includes portable versions of Firefox, Opera, Thunderbird, Gimp, IrFanView, ClamWin Anti-Virus, AbiWord WP, and numerous other productivity applications and utilities. Language packs for many languages are also available.


Here is a link to a longer list of software either included with the Lupo PenSuite or compatible with it, and available for download:

http://www.lupopensuite.com/apps.htm




II. PortableApps
http://portableapps.com/

Another total package of programs that comes in a suite or to be run 'anywhere' as individual programs. This one includes a very nifty portable, run-anywhere version of Open Office, itself a suite of programs that can replace MS Office.

Download versions of the PortApps suite here:

http://portableapps.com/download

III. OpenOffice
http://www.openoffice.org/

This is a complete office suite that includes compatibility with MS Office and other word processors. However, the open document standard that is being promoted with Open Office also integrates with Google Documents, the online word processor that Google provides to its account holders.

Download information is here:

http://download.openoffice.org/index.html

III. StarOffice and StarOffice as part of Google Pack)

https://cds.sun.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/WFS/CDS-CDS_SMI-Site/en_US/-/USD/ViewProductDetail-Start?ProductRef=Edusoft-ENC-RETAIL-Cv1-F@CDS-CDS_SMI

http://pack.google.com/

StarOffice is the commercial version of OpenOffice (it descends from German software that Sun Systems acquired in order to compete with MS in word processors and office suites). However, a free version is available if you have a Google account and you can download it as part of Google Pack software (which is well-known for such titles as Picasa and Google Earth).

Although OpenOffice and StarOffice are 'sister' program suites, differences do emerge when you actually run them. This is, in part, because I run OpenOffice for English and I use a Japanese language version of StarOffice. Additionally, I find I can open document formats in StarOffice that OpenOffice can not handle--such as documents in the format of Japan's venerable word processor and office suite--JustSystem's Ichitaro.

For more information about StarOffice as part of Google Pack, see this blog:

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/08/google-pack-adds-staroffice.html

To download the entire Google Pack, go here:

http://pack.google.com

IV. Yahoo! Downloads
http://downloads.yahoo.com/

Mostly downloads for web communications and Web 2.0 life.

Try http://mobile.yahoo.com/ if you can do real 3G telephony with a programmable phone.
If you are accessing them from your phone, type m.yahoo.com in your phone browser.

V. Google Docs
http://docs.google.com/

You need a Google account, and once you have it, you can co-ordinate your g-mail activity with your Google Docs (such as upload an attached .doc from an e-mail and begin to edit it at the Google Docs interface, which is really a word processor running in your browser). Not only does Google Docs integrate with other Google services, but it accepts the Open Document format (such as documents saved in the default format of Open Office, extension .odt) and Star Office (.sxw) as well as MS (.doc) and Rich Text (.rtf).

Also, make note of PicasaWeb, which integrates a web service for photos with the really good photo editing and album software available through Google Pack, a program called Picasa.

http://picasaweb.google.com/

VI. Other

A. Free Portable Software Downloads
http://www.portablefreeware.com/

B. Open Source Living
http://osliving.com/index.php

For example, imagine replacing Adobe Page Maker for DTP with freeware, such as Scribus:

http://osliving.com/documents/word-office-suites/scribus/

C. winPenPack 3.4
http://www.winpenpack.com/main/news.php

Another suite of programs optimized to run anywhere, such as on a pen drive.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/winpenpack/

http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=827925

To download, go here:

http://www.winpenpack.com/main/download.php?list.201

or

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=214327

Follow-up: Japan and Malaysia to establish a joint university of technology

On 4 February 2008 the Japan HEO Blog ran an article on the proposed Malaysia-Japan International University of Technology.

(See: Japan and Malaysia to establish a joint university of technology )

Here is a follow-up to that story--the latest news from Bernama, Malaysia's official news agency. PM Abdullah was on a recent visit to Japan and on 24 May announced that Japan will provide yen loans and teachers.

Although this is reported to be a new development, this would actually seem to be something more like a disappointing step back on the Japanese side. Before, the talk had been of co-administration and funding, not just loans.

It is going to take hundreds of millions of dollars and a stable endowment to establish a new international university of technology. But accpeting such a burden might have little appeal in Japan because most Japanese students would be ill-prepared and reluctant to enroll in such an institution. It must be very difficult within the Japanese government, bogged down for over a decade in troubled finances, to justify the necessary financial commitment.

This proposed university would seem to be more the vision of Malaysia's former long-serving PM, Dr. Mahathir. It most likely would take someone with his independence, vision and stature to get back on track the project to create the Malaysia-Japan International University of Technology.

Such a revival of effort is well worth thinking about. There is an enormous potential for benefits to both countries. First, Japan's higher education sector could learn how to internationalize its approach to administration and business operations by having a presence overseas. Second, it would allow the Japan's higher education sector, facing a somewhat bleak future with an aging population and stagnant enrollments, to tap into a much more youthful country for higher education. Or make that 'countries', since industries in China, Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines and Indonesia, as well as Malaysia, suffer from shortages of scientists and engineers. A new international university of technology could serve all these countries. Finally, it would also help make Malaysia the true higher education hub of S. and S.E. Asia instead of the land-scare city-state of Singapore.

Perhaps the biggest problem is that the current government of Japan is unpopular. It lacks a foreign policy beyond appeasement of US strategic interests in Asia. And right now the Fukuda cabinet's main concern is its own political survival.

Link to the full article and an excerpt below:

http://web7.bernama.com/bernama/v3/news_business.php?id=335093

excerpt >>Japan Offers Yen Loan For New University

From Mikhail Raj Abdullah

TOKYO, May 24 (Bernama) -- Japan is to offer a yen loan to Malaysia to finance the setting up of the Malaysia-Japan International University of Technology, Malaysian Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi said here Friday.

He said Tokyo was also prepared to loan adequate teaching manpower to Malaysia to put the university, which was planned several years ago, into operation.

Speaking to reporters after bilateral talks with Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda of Japan here, Abdullah said officials of both countries would meet to discuss the details.<< end of excerpt

Why English learning fails in Japan: Reason #5

Why English learning fails in Japan: Reason #5

Note: This is the fifth of a series that will run for at least ten parts. However, readers' comments are welcomed and, where relevant, will be added as reasons in the main series, with full credit given.

Reason #5: Lack of national consensus on foreign language education

This reason, once it is grasped, leads the analysis to many specific problems that are embedded in education in Japan. If you ask many Japanese, they will complain quite strongly about English language teaching and learning in the country's schools, from the junior highs/middle schools (where EFL first becomes a part of the official curriculum) right on up to its colleges and universities. So you might think that there is some sort of consensus for change. But it is not enough to agree that something is wrong with English Language Teaching (ELT) and classroom learning in Japan. There has to be some sort of consensus about what to do about the inadequacy of ELT and learning in order to improve it.

Instead of a consensus, what you will find in actual advocacy and practice breaks down along contradictory lines. Some advocate the education of more translators and interpreters. Some think that the current generations of Japanese who finish secondary and tertiary levels of education (and this is now the majority of young people now) ought to be able to read and even write within their specialties and professions. This thought is similar to the policy that drove EFL learning in Japan between the first and second wars. And to this day you will see the legacy of that period's 'Reading Method' (often misleadingly called 'Grammar Translation') in current EFL classes from the middle school level upwards. Still yet another voice of reform says that Japanese need practical English, and they often cite oral English or 'English conversation' being the best example of what they advocate.

All these priorities bring with them problems. First, you can not train most people to be translators and interpreters, so the education system here needs to be better at selecting talented students for these specialties. Also, if the nation's needs are for people to translate or interpret Japanese into English, more native speakers of English also have to be involved. Second, it can be excessively difficult and boring to be forced to read a FL you can't speak. In effect, it turns English into dead Latin, and most students simply flounder in Japanese translations and related 'grammar explanations' of the English texts rather than read in English. Third, most Japanese don't experience a pressing need for oral English skills, except when they travel overseas or if they work in a business or a branch of government that conducts its international activities at a level beyond translation and interpretation services.

Many in Japan have identified the same problem--an education system that fails at foreign languages. Now they have to take stock of why specifically their system fails and then forge some sort of working consensus for each level and type of education.

At the university level this might be centered on working language policies across the curriculum addressing FL learning's place in the wider general education curriculum. Reform could also be concentrated on better integration of FLT and FLL with majors and specialties for which foreign languages are a key skill.

As for general education, so much of EFL in Japan now falls in this area. There are actually very few programs for majoring in EFL or even majors that require it as integral to a given specialty. Instead, EFL is in effect an ill-fitting part of general education. If institutions do not take foreign language teaching and learning within general education seriously, should they be surprised that the students do not?

We are 'Chiiki Neko'.

Why English learning fails in Japan: Reason #4

Why English learning fails in Japan: Reason #4

Note: This is the fourth of a series that will run for at least ten parts. However, readers' comments are welcomed and, where relevant, will be added as reasons in the main series, with full credit given.

Reason #4: Learning to read and write Japanese fluently takes away too much time from the rest of the curriculum

This reason is really an issue that closely relates to the previous Reason #3. Modern Japanese is a mixed language of unknown affiliation written with a mixed system of Chinese characters (which for the most part are logographs or morphographs) and two syllabaries--as well as Arabic numerals and a small amount of Roman alphabet (such as for acronyms, like NATO or OECD).

Written Japanese works well for the fluent reader of the language, especially if that person is already a fluent speaker of the language (this is true for many written languages, including English). But it takes considerable amounts of time to master literacy in Japanese because, for one thing, of the cognitive and memory loads of memorizing thousands of the Chinese characters. It takes even longer to be able to manipulate the characters to produce written Japanese, even though computers, word processors, and now high-tech mobile phones have lessened this burden.

Mastering a level of literacy in standard Japanese is one of the main reasons given for students here getting such a late start at English as a foreign language (EFL). EFL learning does not really begin in earnest for most students until the first year of junior high or middle school.

Now educators, government officials, parents and social commentators fret that today's students have much lower levels with the standard national language and literacy of it. This might be true, though so far actual documentation of the perceived decline is dubious.

Instead what might be happening is that high standards and expectations are being applied to unprecedented numbers of students because so many senior students proceed on to university or college as a matter of course. Academic literacy as conceived by elite academics, educators and bureaucrats has failed to catch up with the social reality of the 'massification' of the university system.

Still, if standards for the national language and literacy in it are perceived as falling or failing, Japan has still yet another reason to be wary in committing to improving foreign language education for all students.

Cats at University of Fukui

Japan's Tertiary Education System: Developments in the Koizumi Era of Reform

With this first JPN HEO blog post of April 2008, I am using this forum to publish an article that was delivered as a paper at the SEAAIR conference in Langkawi, Malaysia, in September 2006. It will serve as something of a retrospective on happenings in higher education during the Koizumi years of 2000-6 and the preceding years that set up the reforms of what now could be called a political era for Japan.

News posts on the demographic crisis and reasons for the failure of English education will follow in the remaining days of April.


Japan's Tertiary Education System: Developments in the Koizumi Era of Reform
Charles Jannuzi

Abstract

This paper will survey the major developments and changes that have taken place during the past decade in Japan's tertiary education system and put them into international (comparative) and historical perspectives. It also will attempt to assess critically the impact of major reforms on the national and public universities (and the response of the more numerous private universities to these reforms as well). For example, as of 1 April 2004, Japan's 87 national universities were 'denationalized' and incorporated into 'autonomous institutions' (or 'juridical persons') giving them, at least in theory, wider discretionary powers over personnel management, teaching and research assignments, program and curriculum development. The new status was supposed to result in more local autonomy within each institution over the allocation of money for their mandated missions in teaching, conveying public services to their regions, and conducting basic and applied research in science and technology. Have such top-down reforms proven effective, and have their effects matched the government's stated intentions? It is the author's contention that, not only are the reforms a classic case of reform over-reach, but that Japan's overbuilt university system will face demographic, financial and socio-cultural crises that the current Koizumi era of reform, now coming to its close, has utterly failed to address.

Introduction

This year, as the Koizumi period of politics comes to its close, pundits are already skeptically evaluating the accomplishments of his administrations. The PM had promised that his reforms would spare no part of the national government and political economy. He even threatened to destroy his own long-ruling party, the LDP, in order to effect the changes.

Much of the electorate, when asked, said they supported the reform agenda of the popular PM, but in the long run they did not really understand his rationales or his priorities. For example, the profitable postal system (which includes huge, world-class savings and insurance divisions) was not in any state of crisis, however much it might have been the envy of struggling banks and insurance companies. It had already accepted and assimilated reforms that improved its business plans and operations. If anything, the financial health of the postal system showed that government-run companies can compete profitably in a capitalist political economy. Yet the full privatization (and eventual public listing) of the postal system dominated debate in last year's election. Meanwhile, the main opposition to postal reform came from within Koizumi's own ruling LDP. More than anything it would seem Koizumi's desire to 'reform' the postal system reflected a personal vendetta he had against the bureaucrats in charge of it.

Ironically, while the PM was often at war with his own party and the bureaucrats of his own government, his divisive leadership ultimately prevailed, delivering--as much by accident as by design--a landslide victory late last year in a lower house election, defeating a united opposition party (the DPJ) that advocated far more liberal, pro-business reforms! On the other hand, Koizumi's inattention to any sort of foreign policy independent of the US and his open displays of conservative nationalism and unquestioningly pro-US policies alienated much of the rest of Asia, most importantly the emergent economic powerhouse of China.

In one area of government-society relations though, Koizumi and his cabinet pushed for the most radical of reform plans under consideration--the conversion of the country's system of national universities and colleges into individual, autonomous national university corporations (NUCs) in 2003-2004. However, this has to be qualified: the corporatization plan put into effect 1 April (the start of the fiscal and school years in Japan) of 2004 was not so much a break from the previous two decades of developments in tertiary education than a bold culmination in continuity with it.

Overview of Higher Education in Japan

Compulsory education takes in students up to grade 9 (the third year of junior high school), but continuance rates for senior high school are a very high - 95%, with graduation from them almost a matter of course for college-bound students (though the drop-rate from vocational schools is high). A common perception of colleges and universities in Japan is that they are selective and therefore entrance is only gained after passing rigorous examinations; however, continuance rates from the secondary to the tertiary level are now approaching 60%-70%--if one is flexible about what constitutes 'higher education'. Considering the declining populations of secondary level cohorts and the very low failure rate of matriculated students, it is possible to argue that Japanese tertiary education has for quite some time been in an era of open admissions and rivals the U.S. in at least the level of young adults' participation in higher education.

There are currently nearly 1300 accredited colleges and universities in Japan, divided approximately half and half between 2 and 4-year institutions (contrast this with the U.K's totals of 89 universities and 69 colleges of higher education). Even as it became clear that irreversible demographic trends meant fewer students in the future, Japan was still adding new schools well into the 1990s. Such a large number of schools creates a considerable tertiary sector unsurpassed in the non-anglophone world and second only to the US's in developed countries. If the various "senmon gakko" (sometimes akin to the European polytechnic, most usually like the American business college) are also included, the tertiary sector expands to an enormous scope taking in thousands of universities, colleges, and institutes.

Demographic decline and the extended economic recession of the 1990s forced change on Japan, and education has hardly escaped such effects; this includes the tertiary sector of education. One of the possible sources of Japan's economic running in place is demographics: as the society increasingly ages and retires but with a birth rate as low as Italy's, every year there are significantly fewer and fewer children entering the school systems of most prefectures and cities of Japan. Japan's high school graduate population of 2 million in 1992 is predicted to drop to 1.2 million by the year 2010. The question for debate and consideration is this: Can even higher levels of high school graduates enrolling in higher education compensate for the overall decline in numbers? In combination with their nascent efforts at adult life-long learning programs, many colleges and universities are hoping so. For the better run institutions, such hopes may not be entirely unfounded: there are fewer and fewer full-time white-, blue- and grey- collar jobs for high school diploma holders. Therefore, a college education has come to be seen more than ever as the basic award helping one to gain entrance to the adult world of full-time employment. However, even if schools can sustain their enrollments, it is certain that they will have to change in order to meet the needs of (1) high school graduates less academically prepared for sustained, higher level work and (2) older, non-traditional students who may not fit in with the youth culture that now prevails at this level of education.

University Reform: The Prominent Case of the National Universities

In sharp contrast to Japan's image as a nation known for a frenetic commitment to business, modernization and development, most of its national universities have seemed like relatively sleepy oases of teaching and research. Except for a handful of internationally known universities (such as Tokyo Daigaku and Kyoto Daigaku), the national university system had consisted mostly of small, provincial institutions scattered across the country. The national universities and colleges have, since the start of the post-war period, come under the direct control of the Ministry of Education. However the day-to-day running could be called 'collegial', largely managed by co-operating (but also competing) faculties, departments, committees, research labs and academic cliques. Now these universities find themselves at a historic crossroads, one which has brought them under heavy public scrutiny as part of expectations for broad social and institutional reform. In July of 2003, the Japan Diet finally enacted--after much debate--legislation which re-established its 87 national colleges and universities (consolidated earlier from a total of 99 institutions) as 'independent administrative agencies or 'national university juridical persons'; the term now used most often to refer to them is 'national university corporations' (NUCs). Parallel legislation also reorganized under one national agency 59 technical colleges--five-year institutions which combine the last three years of high school with a specialized, two-year tertiary degree. It should be noted here that there is also a parallel system of some 80 public and metropolitan institutions across Japan which are now being forced into a similar set of reforms as the national universities have undergone.

This new autonomy, however, could paradoxically mean potential for more arbitrary control from outside. The universities and colleges have been given their new independent status in order to revitalize research and teaching programs through more centralized administration and the need to prove their qualification for bloc grants while competing more and more for diminishing subsidy from the national government. This creates the first paradox of independence, because the national government and its education ministry can control the central review committees assigned to evaluate the institutions and their programs. Furthermore, the faculty, some of whom may eventually be forced to give up lifelong employment for a system of limited, competitive tenure, have doubts about the criteria by which their own job performances will be judged. University executives and management now have the responsibility of coming up with 'mid-term' six-year plans covering all details of administration, planning, operations, research and teaching.

Revitalizing and Enlivening Higher Education

The transition from a highly selective university system to one for mass education occurred in Japan in the 1970s-1980s. The country now has nearly 1300 universities, junior colleges, and technical colleges (with over 600 being four-year universities). There are over 3 million students enrolled in these institutions, with over 60% of senior high graduates continuing their education into higher levels. Japan's system is only exceeded in size and scope in the developed world by the US's, and is, in terms of its impact on society and the workplace, unsurpassed in the non-anglophone world.

The last decade and a half could be called the first real era of reform for Japan's mass university education system. An often-stated ambition of educational reformers in Japan has been the re-vitalization of the university system with 30 'world-class' institutions at the top. That is, reformers want a tertiary system that can compete with the US's in terms of (1) taught programs beyond the undergraduate level, (2) quantity and quality of basic and applied research, and (3) independence and diversity in financial resources. This goal is far from being realized, though an elite core of around 50 universities and institutes has emerged as better placed historically and geographically to flourish in the liberalized, competitive environment.

Until the early 1990s, because the numbers of high school graduates had always exceeded university admissions slots, matriculation was a reason for celebration. Despite the view that a university education was a four-year vacation from working life, graduation with marginal grades from even the middling universities conferred sufficient cachet to ensure recruitment into lifetime employment. That is no longer the case. Lifetime employment, never guaranteed for women or workers at the thousands of smaller companies anyway, isn't even a serious point of discussion for today's university-leaving job-seekers.

After more than a decade of an over-valued currency and the consequent weak economic performance, related political turmoil, and reform overshoot, more and more Japanese express a loss of faith in old institutions and ways of doing things. There is largely a consensus, though, that there must be reform, though consensus is lacking on what that systematic change should consist of, how it should be carried out, or who should bear the brunt of the immediate consequences. Typical of societies with developed economies and large middle classes, publicly subsidized education has become a major focus of reform, though consistency and coherence of vision is a problem Japan shares with the rest of the developed world.

Some of the goals of the reform being imposed on the national university system (where most university-based research takes place) are felt to be urgent, necessary, and a key component of Prime Minister Koizumi's reform administration. They include the following:

(1) Saving the debt-ridden national government money. This will most obviously be done by eliminating and combining programs, college-/school-level divisions, and even entire universities.

(2) Launching the universities into local self-governance with strict fiscal accountability to the center. Once independent, these institutions may well have to compete for funding among themselves or with other public and private universities. In fact, private universities support the reform of national universities because they hope such changes to the system will free up more public subsidy to go their way. However, given the current fiscal problems facing the national and local governments, it seems that in the long term, the situation will be many more universities competing for a declining pool of national government money. Clearly, universities that hope to survive, regardless of their original foundation (former national, former public, private non-profit, but also now private for profit), will have to find alternative sources of funding and endowment.

(3) Enlivening teaching through effective evaluation of teachers' performance and curriculum development. Many Japanese educators contend that Japanese universities do not foster creativity or flexible approaches to problem-solving in their students, and teacher-centred lectures are often cited as one of the main reasons.

(4) Through competitive tenure the institutions are supposed to become more internationally competitive in scientific and technological research. As already stated, one goal is to take the many small universities and combine them into larger, more cost-efficient operations. It is also hoped that this will result in synergies in basic and applied research that will create at least a handful of world-class universities among the few that will remain. Another reform that is already having an effect is the change in the civil servant status of national university professors, scientists and medical doctors which allows them to form research and business tie-ups with the private sector. Perhaps most importantly the former national and now former public universities are supposed to be put into a competitive dynamic with the more numerous private universities which, up until now, have survived on less government subsidy and higher tuition rates.

Reforming Research

Japan's decade-long recession and deflationary economy have significantly diminished its private industry's ability to finance research in science and technology. Despite slumping tax revenues, ballooning budget deficits, and deteriorating credit ratings, the national government has recently devised strategies attempting to compensate for the decline of private sector R&D. In so doing, it has also intertwined its agenda for increasing research expenditures with its agenda for effective educational reform, especially at the tertiary level. For example, in January 2001, its Science and Technology Agency (STA) was merged with its Ministry of Education (Mombusho) to form the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), an entity that gets a whopping 8% of the national budget. The government also hopes to focus and steer research toward social outcomes to fill future needs more efficiently than it thinks the diverse private sector can. The government's experiences at leading industry-wide R&D consortia reveal that the private sector's research activities are often not basic enough, or they are redundant rather than complementary. Government-co-ordinated efforts involving a large number of companies lack sufficient mutual trust across closely competing companies for there to be real co-operation and collaboration. Also, the national government feels it has to set policy for the 'big picture' of the political economy just coming into focus in ways that make macroeconomic sense if it hopes to foster international competitiveness. It is also widely thought that government policy and spending must galvanize the development of technical solutions to cope adequately with such problems as Japan's graying society or future energy supply shortages.

According to MEXT, in 2001 the national government budgeted over $35 billion for spending falling under the general category of 'science and technology'.Under its second 'Science and Technology Basic Plan' (now in effect), the national government is attempting to fund scientific and technological research at an amount worth 1% or more of GDP each year during a five-year period (from 2001-2005). If broader definitions of what constitutes scientific R&D are used (such as IT , AI and software research), that already large figure could be pushed upward to the $45-55 billion range. In order to help manage qualitatively this huge quantity of money, the second Basic Plan identifies four priorities for funding: life sciences, information technology, the environment, and materials science/nano-technology. Though only a fraction of the amount spent in the private sector on R&D, the bulk of scientific and technological research being conducted in tertiary education in Japan takes place at its 89 national universities (which get the bulk of the $17 billion given annually to university-based research).

The importance of research at these universities is evidenced by the relatively large faculties they have compared to other public or private universities, since many of the full-time employees of the national universities are engaged more in research than teaching. However, national universities invariably reported lack of space on urban campuses with run-down buildings and obsolete equipment. To fix these problems, MEXT had in place a 'Five-year Plan for Urgent Development of Facilities of National Universities'. Such funding efforts were actually a part of the larger Science and Technology Basic plan of the 1990s. In addition to paying for more space and new equipment for research, the goals of this expenditure were specifically (1) to expand graduate schools (including doctoral programs), (2) to promote, identify and reward centers of excellence in research (including 10,000 post-doctoral positions), and (3) to re-organize and develop the former medical colleges as university-annex hospitals capable of clinical research while offering advanced in- and out-patient medical care. These, along with many other goals being discussed, were felt to be necessary if Japan is to create at least 30 universities 'international standard'.

One question repeatedly asked about this 'top 30' goal, however, is: Does it pay anything more than lip service to the improvement of the teaching of undergraduate students--the traditional responsibility of many of the regional national universities? Although comparative studies of test performance in primary and secondary education consistently put Japan's education at or near the top of the OECD countries, international ranking of university systems based on multiple criteria puts its universities consistently at or near the bottom. The national government and MEXT have insisted that, among other things, their reforms for the national universities are intended to promote excellence not only in research but also in all levels of teaching and learning as well, by (1) allowing greater flexibility in admissions criteria (both for undergraduate and graduate programs), (2) focusing on the teaching abilities of academics through both internal and external evaluations, (3) granting national universities independent administrative status (corporatisation), (4) implementing a strict grading system for university students, (5) promoting fixed-term employment so that professors and researchers can transfer easily among universities and colleges, (6) increasing competitive grants for both individual researchers and for entire universities, and (7) establishing more professional and graduate programs up through the doctoral level .

Centres of Excellence (COE) Program

Not willing merely to de-regulate and re-structure, the national government has tried to help institutions attain world class status. For example, there is the government-funded, nationwide establishment of research-oriented 'Centers of Excellence' (COEs), mostly at the national universities and a few elite private ones. Any university or institute that hoped for future top-30 ranking might have helped its case by winning the right to host one or more of the COEs. There are some striking aspects to the plan which seem to raise more questions than they answer, leading to great controversy among national university faculties and administrations. First, there is the 'scrap and build' issue. The plan is supposed to ramrod the reduction and consolidation of the number of national universities, yet such efforts seem stalled because many universities administrations and faculties oppose forced mergers with larger institutions and/or departments, or they are uncertain how to proceed once a merger has been proposed.

Next, there is the related issue of the 'corporatization' of the national universities. The language of the plan says that management methods of the private sector will be introduced. Does this mean that the former national universities should be run along the lines of currently existing private ones, many of which are on the verge of bankruptcy, even as they charge fees 2-3 times greater than public universities? Or is what is meant by private sector management methods something along the lines of for-profit companies? The plan does not really specify just what are the management methods best adaptable to the needs of the national universities as they transition to forcibly merged independent entities of much larger size with multiple, dispersed campuses. Are current administrators supposed to bring in outside advisers and consultants, and, if so, where from--government, government corporations, government-backed NGOs, private corporations, business co-operatives, or third sector non-profits? And if they do, might not such measures actually increase management costs rather than lead to savings?

Questions about Revitalizing Scientific Research

The national government and its MEXT seem unrealistic in expecting two complex processes to be carried out at the same time in anticipation of immediate savings for the national education and science budgets (i.e., one, restructuring and mergers; two, transition to administrative independence). The third major point of the COE plan emphasizes a shift to a competitive system for awarding grants, with outside, peer review of grant proposals. This would seem to indicate that the national government is getting ready to reduce the annual bloc grants given to national universities, much of which support existing research as well as taught programs and subsidized tuition fees. On this third issue, the language of the COE program reflects the earlier call for a 'top 30' set of universities. Yet the plan confusingly calls for grants to go to the best 10-30 universities in each of the following disparate fields: life sciences, chemistry, materials science,information, electrical science, electronics, human literature, interdisciplinary subjects, and 'new areas'.

One obvious question concerning this last priority of the COE program is: Why don't the designated fields match more closely with the specific priorities set down in the Science and Technology Basic Plan? Also, it is not really clear just how definitive the qualifications of the 'expert committee' in charge of evaluating the grant proposals are, especially given the topical range of the actual submissions. Nor is it clear how objective, thorough, or peer-reviewed the actual process of selection was. What is clear is that for FY 2002, around $152 million was promised to be spent over 5 years on a total of 113 research projects scattered almost equally across all the fields listed above, at national, public and private universities located all over Japan.

What is also obvious is that there is as yet no obvious pattern for creating through competition and incentives a 'top 30' of universities or 100 'centers of excellence' in research. Moreover, the money going out through the COE program seems more to be rewarding already existing research programs rather than providing seed money to the new areas of research thought vital to economic and social revitalization. As if the current state of over diversification was not enough, the COE program promised that in FY 2003 it would make selections in still yet five more fields: medicine, mathematics/physics/Earth Science, machinery/civil engineering/construction/other engineering, the social sciences, and 'interdisciplinary' areas.

The COEs now in place across the nation are supposed to focus their activities on doctoral and post-doctoral research and scholarship--that is, if they are active at all. Capable researchers already at work in the relative safety of existing 'laboratories' (co-operating research and teaching groups) have proven reluctant to commit to the new centers. After all, the COEs have no long record of results and often lack a familiar sempai (older mentor) for a younger researcher to work under. Meanwhile, post-doctoral researchers from abroad with only survival level Japanese, such as those on EU stipends, have found many of the centers unable to operate with English as a common language for communication.

Other Types of Co-operative Research

One bottom-up variation of co-operative research that is starting to take hold is the non-profit organization (NPO), a type of entity only recently given official corporate status under national law. Academics from universities or researchers from newly independent institutes can form and run an NPO with a specific mission in collaboration with private companies, receiving aid from both the public and private sectors. Another recent revision to the laws allows academics and researchers at national and public institutions to serve directly on the boards of for-profit, joint stock companies and high tech start-ups (e.g., biotechnology) hoping to go public in order to further co-operative research, both in order to draw in funding from the private sector (much of it venture capital) for promising targeted research and for the purpose of speeding up the commercial pay-offs for such applied research. Finally, as academics move into the world of business, it seems quite likely that the world of business will come to them: As part of a nation-wide, bottom-up deregulation campaign, a Tokyo company involved in education and training has submitted a request to be allowed to start up a university and graduate school; legislative changes to existing laws governing education now allow for-profit entities to set up and run schools, including at the tertiary level.

Venture Businesses

Only universities and institutes that can conduct research and scholarship at the doctoral and post-doctoral levels can host a COE. So universities of all types (quasi-national,quasi-public, and private, including those with no chance for a COE) are now trying a more bottom-up strategy to raise funds and earn sustainable income: venture businesses (VBs). By 2004 close to a thousand such university- and research-institute- linked VBs were in operation, with a record 179 created in 2003 alone. Clusters of VBs have sprung up in the urban areas, such as Tokyo, Nagoya, Kyoto and Osaka. Unwilling to leave things to geographic chance, the national government has also funded 45 'venture business laboratories' nationwide, with most at regional second- and third-tier universities and institutes with faculties of science and technology.

Many of the VBs are joint ventures between a university and a group of investors or a company. Up until recently co-operation between universities and private enterprise usually put a top university in Japan into a tie-up with a top company in Japan. The key scientists and the companies often profited, but universities had no way to get their share if the research led to a marketable idea yielding profits. One recent change to benefit the universities has been the establishment of intellectual property offices on campuses. These can help academics and researchers file for patent, copyright and trademark protections while also assuring that universities get a share of profits from licensing agreements and money-making enterprises which commercialize the intellectual property.

Conclusion

As the Koizumi period of politics draws to its close, critics have already started to downplay the long-term impact of his mostly half-measure or stop-gap reforms. In one area of government-society relations, though, Koizumi and his cabinets clearly pushed for the most radical of reform plans under consideration and got what they wanted: in 2003-2004, the conversion of the country's system of 87 national universities and colleges into individual, autonomous national university corporations (NUCs). However, this has to be qualified somewhat. The plans for university incorporation that were put into effect 1 April (the start of the fiscal and school years) of 2004 were not so much a break from the previous two decades of developments and planned changes in tertiary education as they were a bold culmination in continuity with them. On the other hand, it must remembered that much of Japan's era of reform has been a panicked response to an economic crisis brought about by US policies that led to, among other serious problems, a severe over-valuation of the Japanese yen.

Those two prior decades of changes in tertiary education leading up to the creation of the NUCs comprised many profound developments, such as the following:

-the establishment of a handful of new research universities and institutes, decision-making at which flows from a central administration--in sharp contrast with traditions at national and public universities that are based on consensual, collegial relations across often rival departments and laboratories;

-the expansion of graduate program and their enrollments, including American-style professional schools of business, law, and accounting;

-growth in doctoral and post-doctoral programs, including in newer disciplines, e.g., IT, bio-technology, nano-technology, life sciences, and cross-disciplinary studies;

-a steady increase in the number of international students hosted, to over 120,000 annually, about 25% enrolled in graduate schools;

-more public funding of the entire tertiary sector, including private institutions, which outnumber national and public ones, with a target of 1% of GDP;

-increased funding for research (including more basic research) to compensate for its decline in private industry, with an accompanying shift towards competitive awards, with a target of 7-8% of annual national budgets, and a national goal of 3% of GDP for ALL scientific R&D (with national government spending accounting for 1% of GDP);

-legislative and regulatory changes that allowed the national universities to tie up with other entities to pursue research and expand course offerings, including tie-ups with other universities (of all types, national, public and private), research institutes, local governments, and private industry;

-parallel changes that allowed national university academics to serve on the boards of NPOs and for-profit corporations;

-internal and external systems of evaluation, independent of national government certification, going beyond minimal accreditation, and including accreditation for graduate programs and field-specific accreditation.

However, we predict here that these reforms will not be sufficient to save the tertiary sector in Japan from crisis and partial collapse. The demographic realities are harsh and inescapble. There simply will not be enough senior high graduates after the year 2010 to support the over-built higher education sector. Attempts at maintaining enrollments with international students (there are now over 120,000 studying in Japan) will reach a peak because of the language barriers, since Japanese universities are incapable of providing significant amounts of curriculum in English. An elite group of 50-100 institutions will emerge, while hundreds of colleges and universities will disappear--either absorbed by more successful ones or completely gone from bankruptcy and disestablishment. It is also unlikely that the government will reach its goal of thirty world-class institutions. If even ten institutions make lists of world rankings by the year 2020, and if these institutions are not necessarily limited to old imperial-national universities, these results will, in historical perspective, have been a major accomplishment.

Why English learning fails in Japan: Reason #3

Why English learning fails in Japan: Reason #3

Note: This is the third of a series that will run for at least ten parts. However, readers' comments are welcomed and, where relevant, will be added as reasons in the main series, with full credit given.

Reason #3: Japanese is not written with an alphabet


Japanese is not written with an alphabet.

The writing system used to represent Japanese in continuous text is notorious for its complexity. Chinese characters (called kanji in Japanese) have been adopted and adapted to write Japanese. But one problem with Chinese characters is that they don't fit nicely onto Japanese. Chinese is a group of languages characterized, in part, as being 'mono-syllabic'. That is, one content morpheme of one spoken syllable in length is usually written in text with one character. However, Japanese is, unlike Chinese, highly inflected and multi-syllabic. Using Chinese characters to represent Japanese leads to syllabic and lexical opacity--one character might stand for one, two, three or more spoken syllables.

To make matters worse in terms of the complexity of written Japanese, Chinese characters are typically used to stand for different words or morphemes that may (or may not) cover some of the same semantic areas. For example, the same character might be used to represent two words or morphemes that are synonymous, even though their pronunciations are totally different. This explanation only hints at some of the complexities in adapting such a mismatched writing system to Japanese.

As written Japanese evolved, the Chinese writing system was modified and enhanced to make it more useful for full-blown Japanese texts. In order to help solve the opacity issue, two syllabaries have been put to use to complement the use of Chinese characters. These are called hiragana and katakana.

As these sets of written syllables are used today in written Japanese, hiragana (a cursive set of syllables) is used to write much of the multi-syllabic inflections and particles of the language. It is also often preferred over the use of the kanji for many high-frequency, everyday words and phrases. Clearly, the idea of using a word-level graph (such as a kanji) to write a language comes to Japan from China. But the use of syllabic graphs might come from India through the diffusion of literacy practices associated with Buddhism.

The other syllabary, katakana, captures in written form the same simplified, idealized syllables abstracted from spoken Japanese and captured in hiragana, but it is written with elements derived from kanji and displays the same sort of angularity. Katakana is typically used to write foreign loan words, especially non-Chinese ones. It is also used to represent the elements of Japanese vocabulary that imitate aural, other physical, and mental phenomena (what is called roughly 'onomatopoeia' in English, though it is much more extensive and developed in Japanese). It can also be employed to show emphasis, analogous to the way all caps or italics might be used in English.

Full-blown written Japanese will typically show mostly kanji and hiragana, with a smattering of katakana (unless the text was about foreign loan words, or was a menu at a western restaurant). A text of Japanese might also have quite a number of items in the roman alphabet (called romaji in Japanese) and Arabic numerals (though Chinese numerals are also often used).
But roman letters are rarely used to romanize Japanese, except in the case of synonyms like 'UN' or 'NATO' (which do have their own Japanese pronunciations in the spoken language). Romanization does happen in advertising and on shop signs. You are most likely to see words written in the roman alphabet in academic discussions where an English or other foreign word or phrase is placed in the text and then explained in Japanese.

Since most Japanese--the sort of language that would be spoken informally but also formally--is rarely put into alphabetic form (romanization). Most native speakers of Japanese are literate in their own language, which is largely not alphabetically written. They lack much familiarity or fluency with the writing and spelling conventions of English.

For example, most university students will struggle with a dictionary laid out in traditional alphabetical order (A to Z) because Japanese language dictionaries are typically put into a syllabic order. And one hindrance to personal computer use in Japan has been learner reluctance to interface with a computer using an alpha-numeric keyboard that looks totally alien in terms of the salient features of Japanese literacy. In other words, units of written Japanese refer to words and syllables, not sub-syllabic elements, like letter-to-sound correspondences.

Even though the JIS computer keyboard in use all over in Japan does incorporate aspects of Japanese literacy, it is still most quickly used for input in computing by those who can touch type using alphabetic units (which are then converted bottom-upwards to syllables and then, when necessary by convention, to Chinese characters). The majority of Japanese can not touch type and find the idea of alphabetically analytic input of language to be alien to their feel and grasp of their own written language in situations that require interaction with a computer or word processor program.

Japanese English learners, especially visually oriented ones, might feel that written English is simply too exotic and strange for them to process visually or analyze into meaningful language. English speakers often have the same reaction to written Japanese. Written English's complex spelling conventions are largely outside the writing practices of Japanese literacy, and, to the extent that those spelling conventions actually reflect a phonetic, phonological or morphological reality, they largely do not reflect anything similar to be found in Japanese.

Complicating this are some of the the linguistic peculiarities of English. In the previous installment, I asserted that it could be argued that English is a Germanic language in terms of its pronunciation, but its spelling makes it look like a Romance language. Well, both of these aspects are foreign to Japanese learners of English. Their language's phonology is not similar to a Germanic one, and their approach to writing and spelling conventions is not a Latin or Romance one.

Connecting with e-mail and to the world wide web only really took off in Japan once G2 and G3 mobile phones became ubiquitous. Little wonder then that the Japanese quickly took to web site addresses that are read like digital bar codes instead of ponderously typed in the standard http:// form.

Also, the interface of Japanese mobile phones is set up for quick syllabic level input and conversion of the content words to kanji. Roman letters are a tertiary system, beneath and much more limited than features for handling kanji and the two syllabaries. However, the linguistic habits of many Japanese have adapted to the need for speed in text messaging. For one thing, this has led to the increased use of roman-lettered acronyms to stand for conventionally shared and frequently used phrases.

Some people have even started complaining because these acronyms are taking on pronounced forms and invading the spoken language. Parents are often shocked when they listen to their teenage sons and daughters conversing in mobile phone acronymic 'short hand' at the dinner table. Such developments are interesting for the ongoing evolution of Japanese as a vital, modern native and national language of international importance in the high tech era. However, these changes will have little or no positive impact on English learning in Japan.

Why English learning fails in Japan: Reason #2

Why English learning fails in Japan: Reason #2

Note: This is the second of a series which is supposed to be planned for at least ten short installments (Ten reasons why...). However, readers' comments are welcomed and will be added as reasons in the main series, with full credit given.

Reason #2: Japanese is not closely related to English

Japanese is not closely related to English.

Language families

What people usually mean by this is that English and Japanese are not from the same language family groups, and that Japanese does not belong to the Indo-European super-family of languages. It is fairly common knowledge among Japanese as well as the foreigners who flock to study Japanese (Japanese as a Foreign Language, JFL) that Japanese is not closely related to any other languages. Actually, what some recent linguistics says is that Japanese and Ryuukuan are members of the larger 'Japonic' family. So technically, modern Japanese (and all its dialects) has a relative, the Ryuukuan language (and all its dialects). At a popular level in Japan, Ryuukuan is often equated with Okinawan, and Okinawan is thought of as one of the many spoken dialects of Japan. The fact that most Okinawans also speak and are literate in standard forms of Japanese only reinforces the popular view, since the same thing could be said about most Japanese. That is, they speak a local and individual variation of a regional dialect, and learn and use standard forms of Japanese for education, business, literacy, etc.

Clearly, we can say English is not closely related to Japonic or Japanese. English is often referred to as a Germanic language. This makes it a sister language of Dutch, Flemish, German, Icelandic, etc. Others might note the close lexical and typographical resemblances modern English has with Romance languages, such as French, Italian and Spanish. You might say that modern English SOUNDS like a Germanic language, but LOOKS like a Romance one because of the Latinate vocabulary and the fossilized French-looking spelling conventions.

Comparing and contrasting Japanese and English

In foreign language education in Japan, English and Japanese often get placed side-by-side for comparison and contrast. This is true of much of the content of EFL classes in Japan, from junior high/middle school to university-level. You could call this the type of linguistic analysis for pedagogical purposes that is thought to support the learning of English, but it is also for the purpose of comparative cultures. In the realm of comparative cultures and cross-cultural learning, reference is most often made to 'American' (but also 'British') English as a standard form for learning EFL. Such an emphasis can be misleading, but it is understandable enough given the relative importance of English as a 'global language' and the global impact of American culture. The fact that the US has a population that is much larger than the UK's, Canada's, Australia's, New Zealand's and Ireland's also deserves consideration.

Unlike modern English, which is demonstrably related to known groups of languages, modern Japanese can be called a language 'isolate' of somewhat obscure origins. Origins of modern languages can be very obscure in the absence of literacy and textual artifacts. And even these have a distorting effect, since we still can not recover fully the spoken language. Such is the case of Japanese. More technically, it should be said that 'Japonic' is the actual family and isolate, and that Japonic consists of Japanese (and all its dialects) and Ryuukyuan (and all its dialects).

English can be classified into relationships with west Germanic languages as well as the larger Germanic grouping. This then allows English to be put into a relationship with a 'super-family' that has penetrated the popular consciousness of language, the Indo-European languages. This means that it can be said that English shares ancestry with German, but also Latin and Greek. However, this also means English shares a line of linguistic descent that stems from an historic super-family of languages that also has lines of descent in Russian and other Slavic languages, as well as languages considered 'exotic' by many Americans or British, such as Albanian, Farsi, Kurdish, Pashtun, Indo-Persian, Hindi and Urdu.

Reinforcing this view that there is a 'Indo-European' nature to English is English's history. English has a long history of language-changing contact with other languages, but the most extensive contacts have been with other Indo-European languages (Celtic, North Germanic, Norman French, literary Latin, etc.)

Like English, Japanese is a 'contact' language. In the case of Japanese, though, the exact nature of the cross-linguistic contact is obscure until literacy practices, a writing system and large amounts of vocabulary were adopted from China. Modern Japanese is most likely a literary creole that is in its origins the results of contact (or waves of contacts) due to human migrations to the archipelago. (Much the same could be said about how modern English was formed.) In the case of proto-Japanese, migrations were followed by cross-cultural consolidations across speakers of N.E. Asian (non-Chinese) languages, S. Asian (non-Chinese) ones, Pacific ones, and ones already spoken on the Japanese islands before the migrations.

Outside of sheer coincidences in typology and traits, Japanese has marked similarities with other NE Asian isolates, like Ainu and Korean--namely, word order (S-O-V), lexical morphology, and phonology. And, like these N.E. Asian isolates, it has been related for the purpose of hypothetical discussion with another broad grouping, namely the Altaic super-family, especially the Tungusic branch of E. Siberia but also the central Asian ones falling under the label 'Mongolian'. This is because just about all the languages being discussed here are typologically speaking, synthetic and agglutinative. However, in terms of its phonology, syllable structure, and morphology, and lexicon, Japanese has also been usefully compared to the super-group of Malayo-Polynesian languages.

Applied Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition

Linguistics existing to support language teaching (LT) and learning (LL) is often referred to as 'Applied Linguistics' (AL). AL is often linked to sub-field called 'Second Language Acquisition'(SLA), even though SLA doesn't contain the sort of content with which linguistics is identified (that is, linguistic description and explanation). The relationship of AL and SLA to LT and LL is attenuated by AL's and SLA's theoretical and conceptual abstraction while its research agenda is often separated from LT by different professional agendas (since applied linguists are based at universities). Perhaps the biggest issue is that most of the research results of academic AL and SLA are not generalizable to larger sets of learners (such as, all EFL students worldwide, or EFL students in E. Asia, or EFL students in Japan, etc.).

However, one common-sense notion that is shared across AL, LT and LL is centered on the relationships of the first/native language (L1) with the second or foreign language (L2, especially when the second or foreign language is not acquired from very early childhood. The idea is simple: If a given L1 (e.g., Japanese) is not historically or genetically related to a given L2 (e.g., English), the acquisition or learning of that language will be more cognitively difficult and take longer.

This idea of language difference in terms of issues in acquisition has been academicized somewhat in AL. AL has at least two ways of realizing the idea in its discourse of theory and research. These are often referred to as 'Contrastive Analysis' (CA) and 'Error Analysis' (EA).

Let us look at Contrastive Analysis first. For CA, the L1's and L2's language systems (e.g., phonology, morphology, lexicon, syntax) are compared and contrasted in detail, and the differences are used to PREDICT issues in learning the L2. For example, in phonology, Japanese is said to have no distinction between an /l/ and an /r/. So CA would predict that Japanese learners of English would have a hard time distinguishing English /l/ and /r/, both in terms of perception of speech and in production. On the other hand, Japanese /r/, at least for an English speaker, actually sounds phonetically similar to English /l/, /r/ and /d/. So /r/ sounds could also be an issue for English speakers learning JFL, marking an accent but actually interfering with intelligibility of their Japanese. Imagine such issues multiplying across differences in terms of phonology, morphology, lexicon and syntax. The implications are complex, to say the least.

Perhaps the issues that arise with CA predicting errors that don't occur while not predicting errors that do is the fault of linguistics and language description. If the language descriptions and concepts you are using to carry out a contrastive analysis are inadequate and faulty, then the errors you predict might be nonsense. They might not reflect any language reality, including the developmental language of learners (often referred to as 'inter-language' in AL. Also, languages are supposed to share some traits almost universally while other traits mark a language as unique. So these marked traits could be difficult for any beginning learner, no matter what the linguistic background. For example, English is an Indo-European language that, perhaps due to significant language contact with other languages, has lost much of its inflectional system. This has huge implications for how tense, mood and aspect are actually achieved when one communicates in English. Therefore, regardless of the language background of the EFL or ESL learner, one can predict that the 'grammar' of the English 'verb' will be a source of a lot of confusion and learners' errors.

Then there is Error Analysis. EA came about because some people noticed that CA predicted errors that didn't occur among L2 learners, but at the same time, L2 learners seemed to experience and produce errors that CA didn't predict. So EA looks in detail at the actual L2 performance of learners and attempts to produce a systematic analysis of their L2 errors and learning difficulties.

Which is not to say that EA is a perfect corrective or supplement to the inadequacies of CA. First, a distinction should be made between random MISTAKES that do not reflect the actual state of the L2 learner's language competence and the ERRORS that do indicate some sort of persistent issue. Second, EA is supposed to generalize to a large group (such as the entire population of Japanese learning English at the beginning level). So the hope would be to detect errors that characterize most if not all of that population. But EA is largely behaviorist in its assumptions, so error behaviors could be linguistically or psychologically misinterpreted by the researcher or classroom teacher using such an approach.

Implications for learning a foreign language

Still, there is a commonly accepted feeling or intuition that, if two languages are not related (such as, they have a different word order or are pronounced very differently), it takes longer to learn the L2. This is not to say that Japanese is so unique in relation to English that Japanese learners of English should have more difficulty than any other language group of learners whose native language is not related to English. There is nothing in the conceptual apparatus of AL or ELT that would support this.

However, since Japanese and English are not closely related at all, this lack of linguistic affinity is something to consider in terms of planning for language teaching and language learning at schools. Unfortunately, it is not addressed adequately. Part of this is the damaging effect that results from Japan drawing on English-speaking countries for the theories, concepts and practices that embody the dominant ideology, technology and infrastructure of LT and LL.

Re-stating the issue

Which brings us back to reason #2 for why English learning fails in Japan. Because of the differences in language typology, the beginning stages of LL will take longer and involve more cross-linguistic and learning issues. These cross-linguistic and cross-discourse issues could range anywhere from phonetics and phonology through vocabulary and syntax and overlap with how to structure a a paragraph, essay, or research report. If we think of learning a FL as a classic 'bootstrap' dilemma, perhaps the core issue here will become clearer. It takes a lot of patience, hard work, repetition, review, and attention to the details of the FL in order for a learner to get beyond the helpless beginner stage. Once beyond this helpless beginner stage, the learner enters a new phase: they will have learned enough of the L2 to succeed at learning it further, perhaps up to mastery, if they are patient enough.

The problem with English in Japan is most Japanese never get beyond the helpless beginning bootstrap phase. They don't learn enough English to learn how to learn it. Unfortunately, if they depend on their schools, universities or the commercial ELT industry to help them, most will not make much progress. For one thing, this is because much of the ELT industry, institutions and programs have failed to acknowledge how and why English is difficult to learn if your native language is Japanese (or, in the case of more and more foreign students, Chinese). They have also failed to appreciate just how difficult it is to teach such a large population of beginning learners. To conclude, this should give you more than a hint of the reasons that will follow (e.g., ELT industry, government policies, institutional management of foreign language education, teacher training, etc. ).