The Struggle to Learn English : Beyond American and British English

 

Please listen to this as an old woman’s rambling reminiscence. It happened more than thirty years ago.

 

For someone like me, who had spent the years from the end of junior high school through high school in Britain, the Japanese university entrance examination system was an entirely unfamiliar world. What worried me most was hearing that the English used in entrance examinations was largely based on American English.

 

Let me start with the examination itself.

 

By the time I sat for the entrance examination at my second-choice university, I had already received a rejection from another university. I therefore attended a short summer course offered by a cram school, where I was taught things such as how to write academic essays in Japanese. There, I was told that, although it varied from university to university, American-style English was often used in entrance examinations.

 

Then came the day of my second university entrance examination.

 

One of the multiple-choice questions involved phonetic symbols. We were asked to identify the correct and incorrect pronunciations. Yet all the phonetic symbols that appeared to represent the correct answers were based on American pronunciation. There were no British English phonetic symbols at all.

 

So, remembering what I had been told at the cram school, I thought, “Right. I just have to choose the American English pronunciations,” and filled in the appropriate answers on the answer sheet.

 

So this was the kind of English expected in Japanese university entrance examinations.

I tried to accept the reality, but, to be honest, I was uneasy. American English appeared in the examination, while the British English I had learned in Britain did not.

At that point, I realised just how little I actually knew about the English education system in Japanese schools.

 

Eventually, I received an acceptance letter from a Catholic university.

When I was admitted, I wondered whether my English would really be considered acceptable there.

 

After entering the university, I was approached several times by people asking whether I would be interested in working as an English tutor. Some opportunities involved teaching individual students in their homes; others involved joining educational projects in which university students taught English to high-school students during the summer holidays.

I turned them all down.

To work as an English tutor or participate in one of these educational projects, I felt that I needed to be able to teach American English.

 

I could not teach British English to Japanese high-school students. At least, judging from my limited experience, I believed that the English they needed at the time was American English.

I did not feel that I could teach them pronunciation or spelling that differed from what they were expected to encounter in their entrance examinations. More importantly, these were young people with their futures ahead of them. I did not want to teach them a form of English that might not be useful to them when they sat their entrance examinations.

 

I had already experienced the confusion of switching between two varieties of English myself.

I hesitated to impose the same burden on someone else.

 

There was another problem: this was before the internet.

 

Today, if I wanted to know what kind of English was generally taught in Japanese high schools, I could search for the information in a matter of minutes. Back then, it was not so easy.

 

Perhaps there were schools that taught British English. I simply did not know.

 

But I did not have enough confidence to gamble with someone else’s education.

 

In fact, after entering university, I was occasionally told by people who were unfamiliar with British English that my English was “wrong.”

 

I also remember hearing someone say, “Well, trying to use British English at a Catholic university was asking for trouble.”

 

Perhaps that was because language education in Japan at the time generally operated with American English as its default model.

 

There were British teachers at the university, but many of them were in the English Literature Department rather than the language programme. Since the two departments had different academic specialisations, it was not particularly easy for students in my programme to attend English Literature classes.

 

Looking back from the present day, however, things seem to have changed.

Recently, I was talking with some high-school students, and one of them told me, “Our school has an ALT from Scotland.”

 

ALT—an Assistant Language Teacher—was already a familiar concept in Japanese schools by then, but what caught my attention was the teacher’s linguistic background.

The student read me a short passage in English. Her accent and pronunciation were clearly not American English.

 

At that moment, I remembered a British acquaintance who had worked as an ALT in Japan about thirty years ago. He used to complain that he had been told to use American English in his lessons.

Yet perhaps things are different now.

Perhaps Japanese high schools are no longer as strongly oriented towards American English as they once were.

 

It made me realise just how much times have changed.

 

I do not know in detail how much Japanese university entrance examinations have changed in the Reiwa era. From what I have heard from families with children preparing for entrance examinations, however, students today seem to learn at least some distinction between broadly American and British varieties of English.

 

I have also heard students talk about taking English proficiency tests. In some Eiken speaking examinations, for example, students may encounter examiners who speak British English. Some students also challenge themselves with examinations such as IELTS, where they may encounter English from a wider range of regions rather than American English alone.

 

If I were a university student today, I might feel much more comfortable accepting opportunities to tutor English or participate in English education projects.

 

Thirty years ago, simply having a different accent could sometimes make me feel that I had to keep my head down. Today, it seems that a wider range of Englishes is gradually being accepted.

 

Every time I hear or see examples of this change, I am reminded that times really do move on.

And yet, there is another issue that concerns me: even being limited to the two categories of “American English” and “British English” may itself be too narrow.

 

The English that young people will encounter when they enter the wider world will not consist solely of American and British English.

 

They may encounter English from India, Singapore, China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Australia and many other parts of the world. In fact, depending on their careers and circumstances, they may have far more opportunities to communicate with people who speak English as an additional language than with native speakers from Britain or America.

I have no idea what English education will look like another ten years from now.

But if I could make one wish, it would be this:

 

I hope students will learn that English comes in many varieties.

People who speak English as a first language have their own regional and cultural varieties of English. People who speak English as an additional language also develop their own ways of using it.

 

And I sincerely hope that more and more students will become comfortable listening to, understanding and communicating with people whose English does not sound like their own.

After all, the English they encounter in the real world may be much more diverse than the English they first learn in a classroom.