Though I did not travel to Japan as per my original itinerary, I am grateful to the director of Ark Foreign Language Academy, who agreed to an interview. Below, I detail my reflections. (Note: Some bullets pertain not to the interview in particular, but to general reflections about the trip and my research.)
– Certainly, my difficulty entering into Japan showcases the impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic on international travel. I often experienced friction when I moved between countries. It guts me to remember that I planned to leave Japan today. The interviewee noted further impacts of travel restrictions on ESL teaching: without much tourism, the Japanese economy suffers; additionally, the lack of tourism contributes to a dirge of teachers who would otherwise travel into the country for work.
– Exam preparation continues to be the hallmark of students’ motivation to learn English in some countries. Therefore, the way students interact with English is more like the way they interact with a code, rather than a living langauge. In other words, English is a means to an end, or a way to pass a necessary exam. This trend also directly affects the way classrooms look at accent, which is often not at all.
– Teachers can have charged opinions about “the correct way(s)” to teach accent at each level. Every school and every classroom that I observed has a different philosophy about accent. Because the factors around classroom accent training are complex and innumerate, it is difficult to parse the weight of teaching experience against (or with) the data that linguistics offers. Ultimately, there is no “correct” solution; only a “best” solution for each individual case. (I give a non-answer to this issue of classroom environment vs. research environment in this post; read my final paper to gague my real answer.)
Cheers,
MEG