Gov't eyes standardizing college credits for adult students

Japan's education ministry is considering standardizing how colleges give course credits to adult students and certify them to help the growing number of young job-hoppers, women and retired seniors get a second employment chance, ministry officials said Tuesday.

The plan is part of the "second chance" initiative promoted by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe as one of the key policy initiatives of his administration.

Currently, some colleges provide original credit certificates to students who finish adult education courses, but the way they do so varies from certifying a credit for each course to doing so after a required number of courses are taken, the officials said.

The level of the courses is also diverse, with the target ranging from the general population to experts, making it difficult for outsiders to assess the degree of given credits, they said.

Against this backdrop, the Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry plans to craft criteria for awarding such credits as part of the planned revision to the school education law or in its decree, the officials said.

But the envisaged regulation would not be too specific on details such as the number of required credits so as not to interfere with colleges' own initiatives, they said.

For example, the University of the Air, which delivers broadcast lectures via television and radio, requires that students get at least 20 credits after finishing compulsory subjects in giving its certificate.

Under the conventional school education law, colleges and universities, except for special cases such as medical schools, can only confer a bachelor's degree when students graduate after enrolling for four years and taking 124 credits.

http://asia.news.yahoo.com/070220/kyodo/d8nd6jo03.html

Toshio Saito's school for Japanese-Brazilian children in Kamisato, Saitama Prefecture, is equipped with a computer room, wall-size projection screens to aid lecturers and an 80 million yen gym with indoor soccer field and two basketball courts.

But lacking state accreditation as an educational institution, none of its 150 students can get student discounts for commuter passes, let alone be recognized as having received an elementary and junior high school education upon graduation.

None of the five ninth-graders at the school was eligible to take public high school entrance exams given this month.

"I can't tell if we are a (proper) school or just a private cram school. I don't know what we are," said Saito, a second-generation Japanese-Brazilian.

A change in immigration policy in 1990 enabled second- and third-generation Japanese-Brazilians to obtain long-term resident visas to work in Japan. That led to an influx of Japanese-Brazilian workers and the population of children accompanying their parents and those born in Japan increased accordingly.

But many, like those in Saito's school, face difficulties getting an education, which some claim is the root of the problems of illegal labor and rising crime involving Brazilian children in Japan.
According to a national survey conducted in 2005 by the Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry, the number of Brazilians residing in Japan reached 214,049 and ranked third in foreign national population following 466,637 Korean residents and 346,877 Chinese.

Approximately 35,000 Brazilians in Japan were aged between 5 and 19, the survey revealed.
The town of Kamisato is an archetype of the rapid emergence of Brazilian residents in the last two decades. The number of foreigners registered in the town, which has a population of around 30,000, was a mere 34 in 1987. In the two decades that followed, the number increased to 1,180, with 821 of them being Brazilians, according to the town office.

Saito, 39, arrived in Japan as an immigrant in 1990 and launched his company, which supplies Japanese-Brazilian laborers as temporary workers to local factories.

In 1998, he established Instituto Educacional TS Recreacao, a school for Japanese-Brazilian children living in the area. His initial intent was to run a nursery for infants, many of them children of his clients, to help them adjust to Japanese society and prepare for enrollment in public schools when they reached school age.

"There is so much cultural difference. It would be difficult for kids to head straight from a Brazilian environment into Japanese public schools," Saito explained.

Children from neighboring prefectures soon began enrolling at TS Recreacao and the school grew quickly. Today there are 150 children, from age 6 months to ninth-graders, and 17 teachers. Classes are taught in Portuguese and the school also offers Japanese- and English-language lessons.

In 2001, the school was accredited as an educational institution by Brazil's education ministry, clearing the way for graduates to return to Brazil with a recognized elementary to junior high school education.

But things haven't gone as smoothly with the Japanese government.

"They just kept saying it's difficult," Saito said, explaining that for his school to be an accredited institution, it must teach according to state standards. Abiding by the government-set curriculum would inevitably force the school to stop teaching in Portuguese and depend on Japanese teachers to handle Brazilian students, he said.

According to the Brazilian Embassy in Tokyo, 50 of the approximately 100 Brazilian schools in Japan have been accredited by the Brazilian government.

But none of them is given official school status in Japan, and only two Brazilian schools -- one in Aichi Prefecture and another in Gifu Prefecture -- are granted "miscellaneous school" status, which is given to international schools that satisfy a number of conditions.

Miscellaneous schools receive tax deductions and their students are entitled to student discounts, but their graduates are not considered to have completed Japanese compulsory education.

Most American and European international schools in Japan fall under the miscellaneous school category. Among them, those approved by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, the European Council of International Schools or the Association of Christian Schools International enjoy special status, which enables their graduates to take public school entrance exams.
But annual tuition at these schools can easily surpass 2 million yen.

Educational institutions without miscellaneous school status, such as TS Recreacao, are ranked as privately run cram schools. Although an average male temp worker Saito provides to local factories makes about 250,000 yen per month, his school, without eligibility for tax deductions, must ask guardians for 25,000 yen per month to cover expenses and tuition.

And those unable to pay have no choice but to enroll in Japanese public schools.

Education ministry statistics show that as of September 2005, a record-high 20,692 foreign students were being taught in public schools from elementary level through high school. Of them, 7,562 spoke Portuguese as their native language.

Julietta Yoshimura, president of the Associacao das Escolas Brasileiras no Japao (Association of Brazilian Schools in Japan), explained that there are some 9,000 Brazilian students who attend Brazilian schools and 10,000 others who are enrolled in Japanese public schools.

But facing language and cultural barriers, those in public schools often experience difficulties adjusting to classes and end up dropping out. The Foreign Ministry in 2004 estimated that roughly 15,000 Brazilians of school age are not enrolled in any educational institutions.

Educators blame the high number of dropouts as the reason for young Brazilians committing crimes.

When 12 Japanese-Brazilian children aged 13 to 15 were found working in a factory in Gifu Prefecture last month, they told authorities that attending school wasn't an option for them because of the language barrier.

"Education is the best way to prevent crime. It's not because we are here that the crime rate has grown, it's because the government hasn't given any assistance to the Japanese-Brazilian children," Saito said.

Japan in 1994 ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which obliges signatory states to "make primary education compulsory and available free to all." While the Basic Law on Education stipulates that all children aged 6 to 15 must enroll in school, those without Japanese nationality remain exempt from compulsory education.

Efforts by the Japanese and Brazilian governments to provide a better educational environment for Brazilians in Japan have been making progress. But their time-consuming efforts have yet to bear fruit.

In preparation for the centenary of Japanese immigration to Brazil in 2008, the two governments established the Japan-Brazil Council for the 21st Century three years ago to deepen mutual relationships and resolve issues that face the two countries.

The council, made up of lawmakers and businesspeople, proposed last July that the two governments support Brazilian schools in Japan, improve the educational environment for Brazilians studying in Japanese public schools and establish a scholarship fund for Japanese-Brazilian children.

In addition, a panel on education reform under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said in a report last month that it should further discuss making education for foreign children living in Japan compulsory.

Watching all of his ninth-graders apply for jobs instead of high school, Saito sincerely hopes change will come swiftly.

"While negotiating with the government for approval as an accredited school, I was told that we Brazilians came to Japan of our own will and therefore should abide by Japanese rules," Saito said.

"I think they are right, but it's clear that in the very near future, Japan will have to depend more on foreign laborers," he said. "They should seriously start preparing for that change."

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20070217f1.html

More than 80% of high school seniors have job offers

More than 80 percent of high school seniors who plan to start working following graduation in March had received job offers as of the end of December, exceeding the 80 percent line in the reporting period for the first time in nine years, the education ministry said Friday.

The rate of those who got job offers stood at 81.5 percent, up 3.6 percentage points from a year earlier, for the fourth straight yearly rise, according to the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.

Among some 220,000 high school seniors hoping to work, 41,000 are still looking for jobs, the ministry said.

http://asia.news.yahoo.com/070216/kyodo/d8nan4ng0.html

Still Foreign After All These Years - Japanese universities continue to feel unwelcoming to many outsiders

One way of taking the educational pulse of Japan is to visit the School of International Liberal Studies here at Waseda University. Higher education seems cosmopolitan and vibrant at the school, with a faculty that is 30 percent foreign — drawn from a dozen nationalities — offering a diverse curriculum taught in English to students who must spend a year abroad to graduate. And the dean is British.

As a fluent speaker of Japanese who was the most senior academic on the staff, Paul Snowden was the natural choice for the job. But his appointment as dean last year, the highest position reached by a non-Japanese at Waseda, the country's top private university, was considered so unusual that he compared it to the first moonwalk.

"For Waseda the smashing of this glass ceiling might be seen as a pretty huge step," he told the Asahi Shimbun newspaper.

Indeed, Waseda's embrace of foreigners is still much more the exception than the rule in Japan.

Few Japanese universities have been as ready to take the hammer to tradition. While some parts of society are slowly opening up — the number of permanent foreign residents recently passed two million, or 1.57 percent of the total population — universities in this Asian superpower remain strikingly homogenous and isolated from the globalizing trend in higher education.

According to the Ministry of Education, just 5,652 of the 158,770 professors employed in Japanese higher education are foreigners on full-time contracts, mostly at private universities.

Most of those foreigners work as low-level English-language teachers on short-term contracts.
And although Japan has finally reached its target, set in 1984, of enrolling 100,000 foreign students every year, the bulk of them are from China and South Korea. That means the rest of the world sends fewer than 20,000 students to Japanese campuses each year. In contrast, Japan sends nearly 40,000 students a year to the United States alone.

Many academics and administrators here agree that Japan's insular higher-education system would benefit enormously by opening up to the rest of the world. They cite such problems as the sluggish adoption of new course-management technologies like Blackboard's, the lack of creative thinking in departments and classrooms, and a shortage of programs for older students. Critics add that most Japanese universities are not competitive internationally: Just three Japanese institutions made the top-100 list in the 2006 rankings of the Times Higher Education Supplement, in London.

"Japanese universities are not doing well, and one reason is because the education students are getting is homogenous," says Bruce Stronach, an American who, as president of Yokohama City University, is probably the highest-placed foreigner in Japanese academe. "They're not getting a diversity of views — the ability to argue and discuss and that sort of Socratic give-and-take with their colleagues."

Bern Mulvey, an American who is dean of Miyazaki International College, which runs one of the handful of continuing-education programs on the large southern island of Kyushu, says that when he raised the idea of starting such programs among his colleagues, he was greeted with astonishment.

"They'd never heard of it until I explained it to them," he says. "Finding solutions in universities often involves listening to the faculty members from Romania or Nicaragua or other places who have new ideas. In Japan those voices would not be heard."

The education ministry appears to agree with such criticism, increasingly sprinkling the buzzword "internationalization" in documents on university reform, and proclaiming, at least officially, that more foreign academic talent is welcome here.

Japan's top campus administrators are reading from the same page.

"Universities have to internationalize for the sake of diversity," says Hiroshi Komiyama, president of the elite University of Tokyo — which employs just 250 foreign nationals among its 5,000 faculty members. "People who are part of the same culture and language can no longer really develop intellectually."

His own university's poor record of hiring foreigners is largely the result of external forces, he explains. "A lot of this is not our fault," he says. "National public universities were banned from employing foreigners full time until the 1990s because employees were classed as civil servants." Those rules were only recently relaxed.

Underlying Tensions

Pull back the curtain, however, and major obstacles to reform emerge. Except at a handful of prestigious academic citadels, say professors, university administrators keep foreigners on a very short leash, hiring them only on contracts lasting three years or less, and dictating what they can teach. Faculty positions in Japan are still rarely advertised outside the country, unless universities are looking for foreign-language instructors. And the few job advertisements that are posted internationally often demand that highly qualified applicants agree to spend much of their time correcting the English-language papers of Japanese colleagues, say foreign professors.
Many foreign academics here say they have been discriminated against: snubbed in corridors, passed over for promotion in favor of Japanese colleagues, and worse.

"I was at a university where female faculty members would get off the elevator and take the stairs," says Mr. Mulvey, of Miyazaki. "They said they didn't want to be alone with a foreigner because you didn't know what was going to happen."

Negative feelings among foreigners can run deep. At a recent conference on education issues here, foreign professors compared themselves to lab animals. "When they have been sufficiently abused or have mastered the maze, it is time to bring in a 'fresh specimen,'" one said. Some have sued their employers for discrimination. Several institutions, including the prestigious private Ritsumeikan University, are dealing with disputes involving foreign instructors.

Nonetheless, a growing number of foreign professors are climbing the slippery academic pole in Japan. Foreigners now run research projects, departments, and even universities, evidence for Mr. Snowden, of Waseda, that the system is changing.

Still, he says, his own promotion to dean has put him under special scrutiny. "I've really got to perform well," he says. "Otherwise there will be this excessive interpretation of a foreigner having done badly, and never electing another one."

Mr. Snowden, who is knowledgeable about teaching English as a second language and has written about comparative linguistics and culture, joined Waseda as a part-time instructor in 1980. Like many successful foreign academics in Japan, he questions whether non-Japanese have always made the commitment needed to build university careers here.

Linda Grove, a former dean of liberal arts at Tokyo's Jesuit-run Sophia University, which has the highest percentage of non-Japanese staff of any university in the country — over 50 percent — argues that language has been a huge problem.

"It was very difficult for Japanese universities to take on people who couldn't attend meetings or read documents," she says. "I don't think it was because they didn't want foreigners. It was worrying that they could cope."

Sophia's school of liberal arts is one of the few in Japan that offer an entire curriculum in English and have a campus that boasts a fair number of non-Asian faces. In the corridors here, English is heard as commonly as Japanese, and doors have nameplates for professors from all over the world.

In contrast, most university campuses in Japan are still strikingly monocultural. The faculty at the University of Tokyo for example, looks much as it did two decades ago.

"Many Japanese students have never even talked to somebody from outside the country," says Igo Takahiro, a first-year student. "It would obviously be better for our education if we had more opportunities to learn what foreigners think and exchange ideas with them. I think most of my friends would agree."

Some academics believe that Sophia could serve as a model of the "internationalized" university, with its mix of teaching styles and polyglot community of Chinese, Koreans, Americans, and Europeans. Few Japanese students, however, speak and read English well enough to be able to function in such an environment. Tom Gill, an associate professor in the department of international studies at Meiji Gakuin University, says his department would like to hire more foreign academics but cannot: "Finding a guy who has a specialty other than Japanese is not easy." Many universities argue that hiring more non-Japanese simply increases the workload for current staff members.

Such claims infuriate equality campaigners. "Yes, poor Japanese-language skills are an issue," says Mr. Mulvey, who is a fluent Japanese speaker and reader. "However, this really is beside the point. The real problem is that Sophia University and the few places like it are exceptions.

The vast majority of universities in this country will not hire or even consider foreigners for tenured positions, regardless of language level, publication record, and teaching ability."

The "embarrassingly" low number of tenured foreign professors in Japan bears that out, says Mr. Mulvey. The education ministry cannot even say how many foreigners are tenured, arguing that tenure is a matter for each institution to take up. "We don't know how many Japanese are tenured, either," says a ministry spokesman.

While the government does run a few programs intended to recruit foreign academics, the spokesman notes that "we cannot order universities to hire more foreigners."

For some, this response proves that the government is not serious about internationalizing higher education or discouraging discrimination. "This is an intensely political issue," says Debito Arudou, a naturalized Japanese citizen and lecturer who says universities are "systemically denying" tenure to non-Japanese academics through the use of employment term limits.

'System of Apartheid'

Ivan P. Hall, one of Japanese academe's fiercest critics and author of Cartels of the Mind: Japan's Intellectual Closed Shop, a 1997 book that argues that Japan has put up institutional barriers to outsiders in the media, academic, and legal sectors, says the lowly position of most foreign academics in Japan is by design. "The ministry knows universities discriminate against foreigners and so it lies about these statistics," he says. "Every time you try to nail this thing down it is like jelly."

Japanese universities, he says, have a long record of banishing gaijin, foreigners, to the academic sidelines. The record, he says, can be read only as a determination — "conscious and politically motivated" — not to open up to foreign scholars. It is a system of apartheid that keeps most gaijin "disenfranchised and disposable."

University administrators say it is difficult to find qualified foreigners, but that they are trying. "If they can work the same as a Japanese person, and if they are comfortable with the language, we hire the foreigner," says Takuya Honda, a professor in the School of Knowledge Science at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.

Administrators also reject the idea that the government forces them away from such hires, and that there are any systematic efforts to keep out foreign academics. "I have no idea what the Ministry of Education thinks," says Mr. Komiyama, president of the University of Tokyo. "We don't consult with them when we want to hire more people from abroad."

Mr. Snowden, dean of international studies at Waseda, acknowledges that some of the hiring criteria can be tough to meet. "Japanese universities are wary of committing themselves to people who claim they might stay but who take off after a few years," he says. "I was told when I became full time that I must stay 10 years or 'we're not interested.' Foreigners sometimes don't stay around for very long."

Rhetoric vs. Reality

Government rhetoric often seems least convincing in universities outside the big cities, where a multicultural dawn looks far off indeed. The school of humanities at Hokkai Gakuen University, in Sapporo, for example, employs just one tenured professor among its 36 foreign academics despite its efforts to build a Sophia-style humanities program. Now the university is in a dispute with a foreign instructor who says he was passed over in favor of a Japanese colleague.

"It's a bit uncomfortable, but management said all foreign teachers should be on one-year contracts," says Toshikazu Kuwabara, dean of the school. The university introduced the measure, he says, because it has had "problems" with foreigners, including sexual harassment of students and difficulty in getting along with one another in campus housing.

"We've had to put them into separate apartments, and that kind of thing is difficult to arrange," the dean says. Four of the instructors speak very little Japanese, he adds, "even after 10 years."
The issue of the treatment of foreign faculty members recently became quite public, and acrimonious, at Akita International University, in northern Japan. Promoted as one of the new "internationalized" campuses, the university had agreed to retain about a dozen foreign lecturers after the local prefecture took over the campus from the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system in 2003.

The instructors, some of whom have been living in the area for a decade and a half, say they were led to believe that their contracts would be extended, but were stunned when told at a meeting last July that they would not have jobs as of this March.

Instead, the university told them, their positions would be advertised internationally, in an attempt to recruit the strongest candidates. Some of the instructors were replaced by other foreign academics, but those who were let go find it ironic that, after years of hearing complaints that foreign instructors don't understand Japan and are too transient, a university would dismiss academics with deep roots in the community. They also note that the new president of the university, Mineo Nakajima, is on the prime minister's education-reform council.

"The idea universities are internationalizing is ridiculous," says one of the instructors, Mark Cunningham, who taught English. "They want the distinguished-visitor model rather than someone who disrupts the status quo. It is not a two-way exchange."

Akita administrators deny that nationality was a factor in the dismissals. "We employ more foreigners than anywhere else in Japan, in exactly the same position as Japanese," says a vice president, Gregory Clark, who is Australian. "The teachers knew their contracts were likely to be terminated. We rescued these people from unemployment for three years." He adds, correctly, that limited contracts for all university professors — Japanese included — are a growing fact of life in most countries.

Recent government-led changes in Japan's higher-education system — the most sweeping in more than 100 years — have many academics here wondering whether the result will be the long-promised wave of foreign professors or simply worse working conditions for everyone.

Three years ago, in an effort to force national universities to become more independent and more creative, the government made them independent agencies. As a result, university employees lost their civil-service status, which had effectively given them tenure for life.

The overhaul, which followed changes in university employment rules in the late 1990s, has also strengthened the power of university heads. The Education Ministry apparently hopes that will energize the faculty, by allowing administrators to bring in the best talent rather than leaving hiring decisions in the hands of department heads, who have traditionally preferred hiring their own graduate students.

But the abolition of job security could also pull up the drawbridge behind the smaller number of tenured foreigners, while politicizing hiring and discouraging faculty dissension among newer, younger arrivals.

After 100 years of controversy over the status of foreign academics, say some observers, the ministry might at last produce a level playing field — by dragging everyone down to the same tenuous status.

http://chronicle.comSection: InternationalVolume 53, Issue 24, Page A47

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i24/24a04701.htm

Osaka Pref. to run job center with private firm

The Osaka prefectural government and Recruit Co., a Tokyo-based information service company, will from April jointly run a center for young jobseekers, according to prefectural government officials.

The prefectural government aims to utilize Recruit's ability to match young people with jobs, and hopes to help small and medium-sized enterprises find workers.

According to the officials, the jointly run facility will be the first of its kind to be operated under a public and private partnership arrangement.

In 2004, the prefectural government opened Job Cafe Osaka in a prefectural employment center in Chuo Ward, in the city, which provides employment services for youth.

The prefectural government sought a joint private sector operator for the facility to make it more effective, and Recruit Co. responded to the offer.

The prefectural government earmarked 125 million yen in the fiscal 2007 budget for the project.

Employment services will be offered to people aged 15 to 34, including students and job-hopping part-time workers. Recruit will dispatch about 20 counselors to the center who will provide vocational aptitude tests and individual counseling.

The prefectural government will charge companies to advertise positions vacant with the center. The center will provide the information to young jobseekers free of charge.

"Firsthand information on companies, provided by counselors, will provide thorough job descriptions to young clients," a Recruit spokesman said.
(Feb. 15, 2007)
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/20070215TDY04004.htm

Chinese university may open Osaka branch

The Osaka municipal government has started discussions with Tongji University, a prestigious national university in Shanghai, on hosting a branch of the Chinese university in fiscal 2007, The Yomiuri Shimbun has learned.

According to the city, the Chinese university has reacted positively to the offer. The two parties are currently discussing the size of the school, its location and curriculum.

If the project is realized, it will be the first branch of a Chinese university to open in Japan.

Shanghai is the largest economic power in China, and is planning to host a world exposition in 2010.

Osaka hopes to attract professors familiar with Chinese business practices in an attempt to help Osaka-based firms launch businesses in China.

Tongji University, which celebrated its centennial earlier this year, has about 40,000 students enrolled at its various colleges. Held in high esteem in China, the university has a reputation for excellence in such fields as science, technology, architecture, civil engineering and urban planning.

Osaka stresses the importance of attracting universities as part of the city's revitalization process, and initially made its offer to the Chinese university in 2004, when Osaka and Shanghai marked the 30th anniversary of becoming sister cities.

Since then, Osaka has promoted exchanges with the university by inviting professors from the university to host various symposiums.

Although faculty types and student numbers have yet to be decided, discussions are under way to ensure the curriculum includes classes on Chinese language and business practices.

Among prospective locations for the satellite campus are Osaka Ekimae Buildings, a group of commercial and office buildings near JR Osaka Station that are partly owned by the city, and a privately owned building near the city hall.

The city expects the branch will promote exchanges and build up networks useful for promoting businesses.There also is a plan to conduct joint research with Ritsumeikan University and other universities in the Kansai region.

The Chinese university expects its reputation to be enhanced with the move, and human exchanges with Japanese firms will be especially encouraged.

Osaka currently hosts satellite campuses of 23 domestic universities.

Last month, it was announced that Keio University would establish a base next spring to give seminars on graduate school courses in Osaka.
(Feb. 12, 2007)
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/20070212TDY02005.htm

TOKYO: University to give new students PCs

Ochanomizu University is to provide its targeted intake of 452 first-year students for fiscal 2007 with free computers, according to the university's Web site.

The move, expected to cost several tens of millions of yen, is part of an information education drive at the women's university, located in Bunkyo Ward.

Recipients will be required to hand the computers to the new intake of students as they enter their second year of study in 2008.
http://www.asahi.com/english/Herald-asahi/TKY200702050115.html

Tohoku Univ. readies students for intl world

When participating in international conferences overseas, many Japanese researchers find it necessary to become confident in using English to express their opinions and discuss them with other participants. With this in mind, Tohoku University in autumn launched a new course aimed at helping students to develop the skills necessary for effective participation in international meetings. Unusually, the university has entrusted every aspect of running the course to an outside organization.

The Sendai-based national university started the new course in October last year, holding it every Saturday through December. Two native-speaking instructors were in charge of training about 70 undergraduate and postgraduate students.

On one Saturday observed by The Yomiuri Shimbun, some students were coached on avoiding repetitive body language, while others were told to make more eye contact with audience members while speaking.

During the all-English course, the participating students set out their opinions on specific themes they were interested in before discussing them with others. The two instructors taught not only pronunciation and proper wording, but also body language aimed at enabling the speakers to convey their opinions more effectively.

"It's totally different from the lecture-style courses I usually take," said Fumie Nagai, 20, an economics major and one of the participants in the course. "I believe this training helps me acquire practical English skills."

Places in the specialized course are limited in number, and open only to postgraduate students who scored at least 700 points in the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC) or undergraduate students who scored at least 550.

Before the launch of the course, Tohoku University also offered another one on practical English, but that was self-study based, requiring students to practice listening comprehension using computers. The e-learning course was open to anyone, with no particular requirements for participation.

The new course has been contracted out to the Kanda Gaigo educational group in Tokyo, which is known for its training in specialized aspects of English. The group runs several organizations, ranging from a vocational school to a school that offers training programs for businesspeople.

The two instructors were dispatched from Kanda University of International Studies, one of the institutions that the group runs in Chiba.

Tohoku University decided to go down this path after concluding that it did not have the technical know-how to help students develop practical skills in English. The university decided that it would be more effective to seek cooperation from an outside organization with a proven track record in this field.

The university also decided to bear all costs associated with running the course, charging no fees to the participating students.

In another case of entrusting outside organizations to run an English course, Tokyo University's Faculty of Engineering has had one language course run by an English conversation school since 2005. Open to juniors and seniors, the course charges tuition.

Takao Sakamoto, head of Tohoku University's Center for the Advancement of Higher Education said: "It's quite natural that we bear all the costs because it's a mission for [a provider of] educational services to support already competent students in trying to develop their abilities further."

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/features/language/20070201TDY14002.htm