ABSTRACT
In 2013, the Japanese government announced the “English Education Reform Plan Corresponding to Globalisation,” which was to be fully implemented in 2020, the year of the Tokyo Olympics. The replacement of the existing “foreign language activities” offered in Grades 5 and 6 with “foreign languages” as a compulsory subject was part of this plan. According to the plan, homeroom teachers without any qualifications in foreign language teaching must teach English, possibly with the support of external personnel such as native speakers. Training teachers to improve their proficiency is not acknowledged, as the government’s responsibility, but “English language teaching” is one of the topics covered by the teaching licence renewal courses that teachers must take every ten years. This chapter examines the way PD for primary school teachers is addressed in educational policies and public documents, and argues that it embodies the problems surrounding primary English language teaching, and at the same time is constructed by the particular nature of PD within the Japanese education system.
