Kensaku Ogata
Kubota found in her study that language skill is not considered as the goal, and instead, the goal is to accomplish the task whether in Japan or abroad. She also says that companies do not necessarily prioritize pre-existing skills in English (or another language) for employment or overseas work assignment (Kubota 2011). However, I suppose that in terms of English ability, there are still plenty of companies which prioritizes English abilities rather than the ability to communicate when hiring the new employees. Also, in some companies, the adequate level of TOEIC score is necessary for promotion and other companies even provide a bonus for their employees who acquire a high score. This supports Grin et al. (2010) who suggested, in recent quantitative research on language economics, that language skills are indeed positively related to earning.
According to ETS TOEIC (Test of English as a Foreign Language), the number of companies in Japan which conduct TOEIC test to the new employees was 614 in 2009, and this number increased to 756 in 2013. At the same time, the number of universities which adopt the TOEIC score as substitute for an English exam has been increasing as well. Thus, English ability is one of the must qualifications for the students as well as adults in order to apply for the bright future and the decent jobs which provide more salaries.
However, I am concerned this trend of prioritizing English language evaluate the students unequally. I was teaching in Japan for more than 10 years and noticed that there had been a tremendously strong trend that even middle schools adopt English tests such as TOEIC or TOEFL for entrance examination. This means if the examinees are bilinguals with a general English ability, they are easily able to pass the exam without being judged their capabilities of other subjects such as Japanese or math. In fact, I have had a lot of students in my homeroom class who were able to speak English but poor at other subjects or even communication skills. Concurrently, there were many students who had made an effort to pass the entrance exam, taking even several years of cramming, but unfortunately failed because the schools gave a great deal of additional points on only English speakers. Thus, this is a very serious issue in terms of “equality of education”.
References
Kubota, R. 2013. ‘Language is only a tool’: Japanese expatriates working in China and implications for language teaching. Multilingual Education, 2013, 3:4.
ETS TOEIC https://www.iibc-global.org/toeic/corpo/case/com/rookie.html
Yes, this is perhaps the most serious drawback to the current rush to standardized forms of assessing English in places where local uses don’t require anything like Western norms. You might be interested in this post from Ingrid Pillers “Language on the move” blog: http://www.languageonthemove.com/english-language-learning-injustice/
In the not so distant past my community schools have always used English language assessment and adapted them to better suit the needs of L2 learners. Fortunately, our curriculum department is currently in the process of creating all the benchmark assessments and standardize assessments. We do still use ACTFL (American Council for Teaching Foreign Languages) guidelines to measure language proficiency.