Nobuyuki Hino - EIL Education for the Expanding Circle: A Japanese Model

How can ELT (English language teaching) help fill this world with love and peace, instead of hate and conflict? The world today is plagued with intolerance, as terrorism and war are so often caused by the rejection of cultural, ethnic, and religious diversity. Under the circumstances, ELT has the important mission to provide a means of communication and cross-cultural understanding between those with a variety of linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

What is urgently required in this undertaking is a new model of ELT that will allow users of English to communicate their own values, not only to native but also to non-native speakers, rather than the conventional type of ELT which confines learners within the Anglo-American frame of reference. The present volume proposes one such model, based on my research and practice for nearly four decades, aiming to produce users of English who positively accept the linguistic and cultural diversity of Englishes including their own.

The past 40 years in ELT, in fact, have seen a gradual surge of interest in post-Anglophone (Kirkpatrick, 2010) approaches, which liberate learners of English from native-speaker norms, endowing non-native speakers with the ownership of English (Widdowson, 1994; Norton, 1997; A. Matsuda, 2003). Those innovative schools of thought include EIL (English as an International Language), WE (World Englishes), and ELF (English as a Lingua Franca), originating in Smith (1976), B. Kachru (1965), and Jenkins (2000), respectively. Though this book primarily employs the term EIL coined by Smith, the other two concepts, along with an indigenous Japanese philosophy known as kokusaieigo (International English) (Kunihiro, 1970), are also incorporated where appropriate into my theoretical framework and pedagogical practices.

As the title suggests, this book puts a particular focus on the sociolinguistic and educational needs for the Expanding Circle (B. Kachru, 1985, 1988), or countries such as Japan where English has no official domestic functions. For the Outer Circle, or former territories of the U.K. and the U.S., the spirit of postcolonialism has often motivated the deliverance from the Anglo-American style of ELT imposed by their former colonizers, as evident in the support for the legitimacy of Outer Circle varieties such as Indian English. It is high time that the Expanding Circle, including large portions of Asia, Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa, should also stand up for the right to pursue an ELT of their own, rather than merely continuing to mimic Anglophone pedagogy that is not tailored to their needs (cf. Hino, 1992a; McKay, 2003). While discussions in the present book mainly draw on examples from Japan as shown in the subtitle A Japanese model, many of them are expected to be applicable also to other Expanding Circle situations.

In essence, the teaching of EIL is an effort toward multicultural and symbiotic societies. It is hoped that EIL education, pictured in this volume, will ultimately contribute to the construction of a world that embraces diversity, where people with different values can live in peaceful harmony with one another.