The concept of learning Japanese: explaining why successful students of Japanese discontinue Japanese studies at the transition to tertiary education

Abstract

Student attrition and falling tertiary education enrolments afflict languages education across the ‘inner circle’ English speaking world. In the southern hemisphere, in New Zealand and Australia, Japanese has become one of the most successful languages of education. However, numbers of students are now declining. This paper examines why successful secondary school students of Japanese as a foreign language (FL) in New Zealand who have not chosen Japanese as a major, do not continue their study of Japanese at university or another tertiary educational institution. It utilises a grounded theory approach to explain an area of language learning and attrition which is not currently well understood: the transition stage between secondary school and tertiary education. Analysis of interview data of former secondary students of Japanese revealed two core categories that explain why successful secondary students drop Japanese when they leave high school: the participants' ‘concept of learning Japanese’ and ‘the incompatibility of Japanese and the major’. In this paper, we look at the first of these categories in depth in order to explore these mainly affective reasons for post secondary school students not continuing Japanese at tertiary level. It is hoped our paper will prove instructive for other jurisdictions which are witnessing a decline in their Japanese language students and language students more generally.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments on earlier versions of this article and Annushka Weston for her editorial assistance.

Notes

1. National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) is New Zealand's senior secondary qualification system. To attain NCEA Level 3, the highest level of the qualification, students must gain 60 credits from Level 3 or above, plus 20 credits from Level 2 or above, by achieving a number of standards from their selected subjects. From NCEA Level 3 Japanese, a student can gain a maximum of 24 credits from six standards (five standards after 2013).

2. There is no A2 level in Japanese offered by CIE because of the small numbers of candidates worldwide.

3. School deciles are related to a school's socio-economic ranking. Decile one is the lowest decile and decile 10 is the highest.

4. State-integrated schools were originally founded as private schools, but have become established as part of the state system of education, but with a special character (e.g. religion) and modest fees.

5. Participants' family language backgrounds included English, Korean, Mandarin, Cantonese, Bahasa Indonesia, Bahasa Malaysia and Samoan.