The one topic that Japanese always bring up with me if they speak English, and in Japanese, too is—food! This topic is easy, of course, uncontroversial, and the beginning of many interactions. Yet, more often than not, once the topic of food is finished, the conversation dies. It often seems like a conversation on pizza, or natto or chopsticks, or…nothing! Students all over the country have been trapped inside the “I like pizza” mindset and will never escape. Japan is awash in English textbooks that encourage this “I like pizza” mindset:
Many others have highlighted the necessity of experiencing real and authentic opportunities to communicate in English classes in Japan. Getting real in schools will involve changing the roles that teachers and students assume. As long as the model applied is teacher as distributor of knowledge and students as recipients of this knowledge, authentic opportunities in the classroom for using English will remain out of reach. That paradigm needs to be transformed in ways to narrow the gap between teachers and students, or possibly make it blurry.