I would like to comment on Gary Henscheid’s June 16 letter, “Improving English education.” I fully support his suggestions to make English an elective and to have the education ministry expand programs for studying abroad.
Japan has changed at very high speed in various ways. For one thing, many different people from different countries work and live in Japan today. Most of them cannot speak English, so we cannot always communicate with them through the English language. In this sense, Japan can now be called a multicultural, multilingual society, and if we look at the whole world, we will find that the number of spoken languages is nearly 7,000.
Looking at this reality makes us think seriously that language studies other than English are also urgent. I admit that English study is important in this globalized society, but instead of making only English an elective subject, we should provide students more opportunities to learn other languages also.
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.