Encouraging students to speak in many voices

With the population of 18-year-olds decreasing every year, Japanese universities are facing a fight for survival. Over a quarter of them could not recruit enough students to fill their official capacity last year.

Foreign language faculties are no exception. Although learning English has had an unprecedented boom in Japan in recent years, this has not really benefited university foreign language faculties.

For one thing, other departments have been putting increasingly more emphasis on their own English teaching programs. English, in other words, is no longer the specialty of the English department.

Other departments such as German and French are also having difficulty recruiting good students. Moreover, the demand of the students in these departments--and even of their parents--for more English-language courses is so strong that these departments are on the verge of sacrificing their own courses to open extra English courses.

This is a sad situation. True, none can deny the importance of English as a communication tool in today's globalized world. To learn different languages, though, is also to learn and understand different cultures and peoples, to better appreciate the values of others and learn how humanity can better coexist.

Oddly enough, a growing number of foreigners living in Japan are non-English-speaking Asians and South Americans. Since many of them have Asian features, especially Chinese and Koreans, we tend to overlook this fact. But even our neighborhoods are becoming multicultural, a tendency that will increase with the anticipated future shortage of younger workers.

In such a society, learning English alone seems insufficient, as important as the language may be in business and academic environments.

What should the future of a faculty of foreign languages be in this situation?

I have two tentative, contradictory prescriptions: The first is to make our students specialists, and the second is to make them generalists.

The first applies to the departments of English and other languages. To survive in the current situation, English majors must have excellent language skills, and the department should offer effective and extensive language programs.

The same applies to the departments of other languages--though fortunately, these students may not need extraordinarily high-level skills because they have fewer competitors than English majors. Nonetheless, these departments should still provide their students with a minimal English proficiency.

In addition, all language departments should offer sets of courses to make their students specialists in their chosen fields. Students should be equipped with both the theoretical and practical aspects of communication needed to understand the culture and to interact with the people who use the language they are learning. The keyword here is communication, or "intercultural communication." My hypothesis is that you can cope with a multicultural situation if you have sufficiently mastered a bicultural one.

My second proposed solution--producing generalists--is based on my experience with the Department of Languages and Culture at Dokkyo.

Here, students are required to learn both English and either Spanish or Chinese; they study both languages equally. The department also offers a good Japanese language program and has successfully recruited students from overseas, especially from East Asian countries where Japanese and English are usually emphasized.

Many of the faculty here come from the former liberal arts division, which used to take care of liberal arts education for the whole university. Partly as a result, the department offers a wide variety of courses, including Japanese studies.

Despite our worries that it was too far oriented to producing generalists, it has been successful since its creation seven years ago. Many of the graduates have a very good reputation in the business and academic sectors. The department's emphasis on liberal arts education and the study of not only Spanish-speaking areas and China but Japan itself, together with the multicultural environment created by the overseas students, has made its students the kind of language majors that can send out messages about their own country and culture--true generalists, in other words.

As we are not yet sure which of these two solutions is correct, we have decided to create a new faculty of "international liberal arts" by enlarging and strengthening the present Department of Languages and Culture.
In this new faculty, students will be able to also learn English and Korean. The emphasis will be on the study of the developing Pacific Rim regions, the evaluation of Japanese culture and thought, the understanding of the significance of the multilingual and multicultural environment, and on international exchanges. The program will start next April if approved by the Ministry of Education.

Which will appeal more, the generalist or the specialist approach? Hopefully, both answers are correct.
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The author is the dean of the Faculty of Foreign Languages at Dokkyo University.(IHT/Asahi: May 8,2006)

http://www.asahi.com/english/Herald-asahi/TKY200605080091.html