Staff writer
In the future, high school students may be taught to gesture like foreigners while in language class, but the latest draft of teaching guidelines proposed by the Education Ministry will probably not be enough for them to feel at ease with their English-speaking skills anytime soon, critics say.
"Schools have a fundamentally different concept of English language education" compared with private-conversation schools, said Yukitomo Ishimatsu, a representative of Nova Corp., the nation's leading English school chain. "While we think of English as a form of communication, (regular) schools still focus on the reading, writing, grammar and pronunciation that appears in tests."