ABSTRACT
The Japanese university entrance examination is an emotionally charged issue. Some people claim that it is a necessary evil only, useful for screening out the students, and if the system were to be eliminated, admission being given to all the students who wish to go to higher education, our education would become far better than it is now. Others argue that without the entrance examination, no students would study seriously. Indeed, a review of various opinions reported in the mass media in the past 10 years (Watanabe, 1997a) produced more than 500 claims, assertions, and anecdotes, the majority of which (approximately 80%) were concerned with negative aspects of the examination, with the only exception that the examination may motivate students (e.g., Ogawa, 1981; Vogel, 1979). In spite of this large number of claims, however, they may be summarized by referring to only a few common, underlying assumptions. First, it seems to be taken for granted that the university entrance examination drives students and teachers to do something undesirable, such as teaching of test-taking techniques, overreliance on grammar-translation, neglect of aural/oral aspects of English, a limited variety of classroom organization patterns, such as teacherfronted or lock-step, etc. (e.g., Ministry of Education, Science and Culture, 1992; Nagano, 1984; Reischauer, Kobayashi, & Naya, 1989). An obvious corollary of this is the act of blaming the absence of particular skills in the examination for a particular skill being not taught in the classroom, with reference to listening in particular (JACET, 1993; Shiozawa, 1983), leading to underuse of English in aural/oral modes. The second assumption goes in a
Yoshinori Watanabe Akita National University
different direction from the first: One takes note of an undesirable educational practice, such as teaching with overemphasis on formal aspects of English rather than its use, and attributes its cause to the presence of the examination, in which, it is claimed, formal aspects are unduly emphasized.
