Backward yakudoku: an attempt to implement CLT at a Japanese high school

ABSTRACT

How can Japanese teachers of English go about introducing more communicative activities suitable for their contexts? This article discusses an attempt by a high school teacher to implement communicative language teaching (CLT) in her classes while responding to institutional pressure to use yakudoku (a traditional grammar translation methodology) and focus on test and exam preparation. The article explains how the teacher, working with a mentor, rearranged the format of her classes to encourage more interactive activities, with translation activities used as review to prepare students for tests. This paper introduces the changes made over two cycles of the project, and suggests implications from the project which could be tested in other contexts, such as using outside mentors to help teachers to innovate, and focusing training experiences on getting teachers to experiment with CLT in their contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Communicative methodologies
• teacher training
• action research
• EFL

Acknowledgments

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Gene Thompson is an Assistant Professor in the College of Business at Rikkyo University, Japan. He researches teacher cognitions, teacher training, and curriculum design. He is currently undertaking his PhD research investigating Japanese high school English teachers’ self-efficacy for teaching English.

Mayuno Yanagita teaches at a public high school in Ibaraki, Japan. She completed her MA in TESOL from Macquarie University, Sydney. She is interested in how change happens in real-word high school classrooms.