Dear minister of education Tatsuo Kawabata,
I wish to draw your attention to practices in university English departments in Japan that are by their very nature counterproductive and often harmful to the acquisition of English as a foreign language. I have been a university instructor for the past four years and have taught English in Japan for the past 12 years. I also have a TESL certificate and a masters in applied linguistics.
To understand this situation one must remember that most of the English teaching industry in Japan is based on the Nova (now defunct) model. As most professional EFL instructors are aware, Nova was not an educational institution. It was primarily a business. I am sure you are aware that most universities in Japan (some 1,700 institutions) are private. Over the past decade, rather than making an effort to make education in Japan more international by having more tenured foreign instructors, the university industry has opted to have more part-time Japanese and foreign instructors.