The National Core Curriculum for Pre-service English Teacher Education was recently introduced in Japan. Implementing it effectively demands concrete teaching models, syllabuses, and teaching methodology. The goals of our research are to gather comprehensive information regarding best practices and propose long-awaited model programs.
Preparing effective second or foreign language teachers is one of the major concerns among government officials and professional organizations (i.e., ACTFL, 2014; TESOL, 2018). National standards or core curriculum are thus designed and used by teacher education programs around the world. Japan’s new National Core Curriculum for Pre-service English Teacher Education (henceforth the Core Curriculum) was implemented in 2019. This curriculum intends to improve prospective teachers’ teaching skills and English skills so they may effectively conduct communicative English classes. Universities offering English teacher certificate programs for secondary and primary levels must abide by the curriculum and cover all the knowledge and skill-based contents listed in it. However, although what to teach is made clear in the Core Curriculum, making it work effectively is another story. Concrete teaching models and syllabuses as well as teaching methodology are in great demand. The goal of our research is to propose concrete and comprehensive model programs. To achieve this purpose, we first administered a questionnaire to more than 500 instructors in charge of English teacher certificate programs in order to gather information regarding their attempts to implement the Core Curriculum at their universities. Secondly, to further investigate the effective practices among them, one-to-one semi-structured interviews were conducted with the instructors who showed exemplified excellent practice. The data obtained were quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed. The results provide us with appropriate samples of syllabuses and instructional models to implement the Core Curriculum. In addition, an array of techniques on how to effectively deal with the demands of the Core Curriculum in a limited number of courses and how to manage courses with a large class size were obtained. We will present concrete and comprehensive model programs based on these findings, in our presentation. Possible proposals for the improvement of the Core Curriculum will also be discussed.
