The Challenges Faced by Teachers of Japanese in New Zealand Secondary Schools
type: CreativeWork
description: This research aims to investigate current challenges that Japanese language teachers are facing in New Zealand secondary schools. There have been many studies on the challenges of foreign language provision in New Zealand, but my research is different from most others in that its focus is on the teacher’s perspective. Because of the difficulties of formulating a hypothesis due to a lack of past studies on this topic from the point of view of the teachers, I needed a research methodology that would allow me to start collecting data without a theoretical framework. For this reason, I adopted grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) as my methodology. The data were collected through two focus group discussions and follow-up individual face-to-face interviews. A total of 12 in-service secondary school teachers of Japanese in the Auckland area, six of whom were native speaker teachers (NSTs) and six non-native speaker teachers (NNSTs), participated in my research. My assumption prior to data collection was that the teachers’ main challenges would be relating to the new teaching approaches or assessments recently introduced under The New Zealand Curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2007b). However, what emerged as a significantly recurring theme from data analysis was the apparent lack of value being placed on foreign language education due to the “English-is-enough” mind-set that prevails in New Zealand society. Students do not perceive foreign language skills as being relevant career skills and careers advisors in schools do not recommend foreign language study either. As a result, the take-up and retention rates of students studying foreign languages in secondary schools have been declining and, of all the foreign languages, Japanese has been hit the hardest with a 55.5 percent decrease since 1996. The repercussions of “non-value of foreign language education” are the same for the NSTs and NNSTs of Japanese. They include the need to create learning and teaching resources…
abstract: This research aims to investigate current challenges that Japanese language teachers are facing in New Zealand secondary schools. There have been many studies on the challenges of foreign language provision in New Zealand, but my research is different from most others in that its focus is on the teacher’s perspective. Because of the difficulties of formulating a hypothesis due to a lack of past studies on this topic from the point of view of the teachers, I needed a research methodology that would allow me to start collecting data without a theoretical framework. For this reason, I adopted grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) as my methodology. The data were collected through two focus group discussions and follow-up individual face-to-face interviews. A total of 12 in-service secondary school teachers of Japanese in the Auckland area, six of whom were native speaker teachers (NSTs) and six non-native speaker teachers (NNSTs), participated in my research. My assumption prior to data collection was that the teachers’ main challenges would be relating to the new teaching approaches or assessments recently introduced under The New Zealand Curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2007b). However, what emerged as a significantly recurring theme from data analysis was the apparent lack of value being placed on foreign language education due to the “English-is-enough” mind-set that prevails in New Zealand society. Students do not perceive foreign language skills as being relevant career skills and careers advisors in schools do not recommend foreign language study either. As a result, the take-up and retention rates of students studying foreign languages in secondary schools have been declining and, of all the foreign languages, Japanese has been hit the hardest with a 55.5 percent decrease since 1996. The repercussions of “non-value of foreign language education” are the same for the NSTs and NNSTs of Japanese. They include the need to create learning and teaching resources…
author: Haba, Kimiko
keywords: Japanese, Language education
date published: 2014
date modified: 2026-07-27T18:46:20Z
provider: AUT University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: AUT University