Understanding EIL curriculum development in the expanding circle : East Asian region through the world of textbooks in Taiwan and Japan

Abstract

Teaching English as an international language (EIL) has been considered by many scholars as an alternative approach more suited to the sociolinguistic realities of this international language today. As an emerging and innovative framework, its implications for English language teaching have mostly been applied by EIL-conscious academics in higher education contexts. This study explored EIL curriculum development in the public education system, particularly the lower secondary level in Taiwan and Japan, in the Expanding Circle-East Asian (ECEA) region. ECEA, a framing utilised in this study, denoted a region that shared similarities in the categorisation of the spread of English, considered as relatively homogeneous compared to its Southeast Asian neighbours, and saw a relatively stable status of English language in its respective language-in-education policy environments.

This study attended to the cultural component as a practical gap in EIL curriculum research (Zacharias, 2014), and examined the extent of and the reasons for commonalities and differences in school EIL curriculum content in Taiwan and Japan. An integrated conceptual framework was used to situate the examination of English curriculum content within the analysis of EIL curriculum perspective (McKay, 2002; Matsuda & Friedrich, 2011; Kirkpatrick, 2012; Wen, 2012; Brown, 2012), purposes of national education systems, and within the contextualisation of English language education as a part of government’s internationalisation efforts. That is, it contextualised EIL curriculum study within actual national curricular, and socio-cultural contexts to facilitate a more comprehensive understanding of its’ development.

Two top-distributed, locally designed, and government-endorsed junior high English textbook series from both Taiwan and Japan were selected. Eighteen textbooks from Grade 7 to Grade 9 used in 2013-2014 school year were analysed. Qualitative content analysis, both deductive category assignment and inductive category formation procedures, were employed to elicit EIL curriculum content structures and features. Underlying commonalities and differences of content structures and features and their relevance to the larger curricular and social context were analysed.

Three commonalities found in Taiwanese and Japanese English textbook content features – the phenomenon of shrinking of the ‘Trojan horse’, expression of national identity, and socio-political function and cross-curricularity – illustrated common mechanisms within national compulsory education systems in managing the observed integrative tensions from the legitimisation of English as a compulsory school subject. However, profound differences, manifested in the (un)institutionalised EIL discourse in national curriculum environments, showed dissimilar mentalities governing EIL curriculum planning in Taiwan and Japan. These mentalities, as expressions of official English education rhetoric, were further suggested to be relevant to the dynamics that occurred in the formation of unified national identifications, particularly in individual nation’s internationalisation processes. Drawing on a theoretical lens that captures a multidimensional understanding to the formation of national identity in the world of increased contact (Featherstone, 2000), conceptual distinctions of ‘non-West’ and ‘West’ – as the significant others in relation to the construction of national identity in Taiwan and Japan, respectively – was suggested to serve as influential factors in effecting local English curriculum content planning, in national curriculum contexts in the ECEA region.