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- TOEFL iBT (an English test) score of Japanese speakers - 104th of speakers of 113 languages
TOEFL iBT (an English test) score of Japanese speakers - 104th of speakers of 113 languages
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2010年、日本語話者のTOEFL iBTスコア平均は113言語中104位という不名誉な結果に。
TOEFL iBT is one of the most popular international English proficiency qualification especially desined for those who want to study in universities in English-speaking countries. TOEFL stands for "Test of English as a Foreign Language" and iBT means "internet-Based Testing". Each of the Listening, Speaking, Reading, and Writing section has the maximum of 30 scores and the full score in total is 120.
You may wonder how they test one's speaking ability. You are demanded to answer a question in English and speak to a microphone. Your answer is recorded in the computer, and later is examined by the scorers.
Japanese people are notorious for their not very wonderful speaking and listening abilities of English. Unfortunately, half of the total score of TOEFL iBT is for speaking and listening. As we expect from this test format, in 2010, the average TOEFL iBT score of native Japanese speakers, which are almost equal to Japanese people, was 69 and ranked the 104th of speakers of 113 languages.
In particular, the average score for the Speaking section of Japanese-speaking people recorded the worst in the world, which tells you something.
TOEFL iBT results 2010
http://www.ets.org/research/policy_research_reports/toefl-sum-10
Given these miserable status, I'd like to propose a new radical entrance exam system for graduate schools of science, technology and medicine etc in Japan.
Instead of carrying out traditional paper tests mostly for translation abilities, it may be better to set the minimum TOEFL iBT score to allow one to have the entrance exams. For the actual entrance exam, an essay may be better than just translations, because writing an essay in English is good practise for writing papers in English. Even lazy university students (though I was one of the laziest) in Japan would have to work harder to polish their listening and speaking skills as well as writing while they're still undergraduates to enter the graduate schools. If they want to be scientific researchers, they need to learn those anyway to communicate with scientists of other countries.
How do you think about this?
TOEFL iBT is one of the most popular international English proficiency qualification especially desined for those who want to study in universities in English-speaking countries. TOEFL stands for "Test of English as a Foreign Language" and iBT means "internet-Based Testing". Each of the Listening, Speaking, Reading, and Writing section has the maximum of 30 scores and the full score in total is 120.
You may wonder how they test one's speaking ability. You are demanded to answer a question in English and speak to a microphone. Your answer is recorded in the computer, and later is examined by the scorers.
Japanese people are notorious for their not very wonderful speaking and listening abilities of English. Unfortunately, half of the total score of TOEFL iBT is for speaking and listening. As we expect from this test format, in 2010, the average TOEFL iBT score of native Japanese speakers, which are almost equal to Japanese people, was 69 and ranked the 104th of speakers of 113 languages.
In particular, the average score for the Speaking section of Japanese-speaking people recorded the worst in the world, which tells you something.
TOEFL iBT results 2010
http://www.ets.org/research/policy_research_reports/toefl-sum-10
Given these miserable status, I'd like to propose a new radical entrance exam system for graduate schools of science, technology and medicine etc in Japan.
Instead of carrying out traditional paper tests mostly for translation abilities, it may be better to set the minimum TOEFL iBT score to allow one to have the entrance exams. For the actual entrance exam, an essay may be better than just translations, because writing an essay in English is good practise for writing papers in English. Even lazy university students (though I was one of the laziest) in Japan would have to work harder to polish their listening and speaking skills as well as writing while they're still undergraduates to enter the graduate schools. If they want to be scientific researchers, they need to learn those anyway to communicate with scientists of other countries.
How do you think about this?
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TOEFL iBT is one of the most popular international English proficiency qualifications especially designed for those who want to study at a university in an English-speaking country. ("one of the most popular ... qualifications" or "is the most popular ... qualification")
Each of the Listening, Speaking, Reading, and Writing sections has a maximum of 30 points, with a combined total of 120.
You are demanded to answer a question in English and speak into a microphone.
Your answer is recorded in the computer, and later (it is) examined by the scorers.
Japanese people are notorious for their not very wonderful speaking and listening abilities when it comes to English. (seems more natural and easier to read)
Unfortunately, half of the total score of TOEFL iBT is taken from the speaking and listening sections.
As expected from such a scoring format, in 2010, the average TOEFL iBT score of native Japanese speakers, a good representative of Japanese people, was 69 and ranked 104th out of 113 spoken languages. (I guessed on the blue part. Sorry, I wasn't sure of your exact meaning)
Given this miserable status, I'd like to propose a new radical entrance exam system for graduate schools of science, technology and medicine etc in Japan.
Instead of carrying out traditional paper tests mostly for translation abilities, it may be better to set a minimum TOEFL iBT score allowable to take the entrance exams.
Even lazy university students (though I was one of the laziest) in Japan would have to work harder to polish their listening and speaking skills as well as writing while they're still undergraduates to enter graduate school.
If they want to be scientific researchers, they need to learn those skills anyway to communicate with scientists of other countries.
What do you think about this? -or- How do you feel about this?
I don't think that forcing medical grad students to have a decent accent would improve the average score on the TOEFL iBT. It might produce improvements in the medical field internationally, but I don't see the need to force them to attain an English/American accent, at least not in the medical field.
If Japan is so concerned about it's accent, it needs to start in school when children are young and teach them the difficult sounds like 'th', R/L, etc. Children are young and innocent, and are more acceptable to absorbing new sounds and making them their own, more so than an adult of graduate school level would be. Not saying adults can't learn languages/sounds as well as children, however, a child hasn't learned many of society's standards and values yet, and sucks in everything around them as new and exciting without prejudice, giving them the advantage.
Just my two cents/pence. :)
Thanks for the detailed corrections. Your comments are also thought-provoking. So I'll write about my provoked ideas below.
Now the Japanese government decided to start English education from elementary school, as you proposed (I should have mentioned it above). The younger they start learning English sounds, the better their ears and tongues would be, for sure.
The thing is that most of Japanese people wouldn't use English routinely as part of their work or life. Forcing all young Japanese children to master R and L sounds requires a lot of effort. When it comes to pronunciations, we don't have many good teachers in the first place, so I bet the effort would fail. Moreover, most of the effort may not be repaid if they are not going to be scientists or international traders etc.
So basically I doubt the effect of the early-onset English education scheme at moment. I think it is too ambitious to expect every single Japanese people to speak English with a decent accent. Probably, they don't even have to.
If you imagine the other-way-around situation, it would be interesting. Just by learning Japanese in classes at elementary schools in the US, can all the American kids obtain Japanese proficiency? I'm afraid that it's not that easy. :)
On the other hand, some people in some particular professions including scientists and international traders need to speak English. So I think we have to throw away the dream idea of the equal education about English. People have to decide whether they are going to use English heavily in their later carrier or not at some point.
You can't decide your career at 6 years old yet. So my idea is that when you become 18 and enter an undergraduate course of an university, you decide whether you go to a graduate school. If you want to go, then you study harder than ever mostly on your own because your future career is up to the test results.
I think universities don't have to provide special classes to pass the TOEFL iBT. It's each student's own responsibility.
How about that? Still do you like the early-onset eduction better?
I meant that those who speak Japanese language as a mother tongue are almost equivalent to people living in Japan.
I don't really see Japan becoming any better at English education though. I could throw out five million and one ideas for a better teaching method, but it would never be implemented. After all, Japanese are Japanese and speak Japanese, right? If they didn't speak Japanese, no one would, and THAT is scarier than anything else. I understand that side as well, because it's no different over here. We start learning a foreign language around age 11 or 13, depending on your school system, however you're not forced to learn one, and you can move on to college and graduate school without ever learning one. People here are afraid of 'foreigners' taking over, which is very understandable, considering the number of immigrants we have here. So, every time it's proposed to introduce foreign languages earlier, especially French and Spanish, unless the school is located in an overly multi-cultural area, it is almost always shot down and kept as is. It's unfortunate really.
(Some areas like New Orleans and Southern California, have bilingual schools available, since they have such a comparatively large foreign language speaking population.)
I think more so than early-onset 'education', 'exposure' is a better word. I'm a firm believer of the fact that you don't learn a language, you get used to it. (Like a sport/instrument). The problem might more than likely be that they are tested on it. The moment you make something 'unfun' in the eyes of a child, they won't ever want to do it again.
Japanese is relatively easy from an English background though, at least pronunciation-wise. We already have all of the sounds you use, there's nothing new to learn. Only your R, which is in the middle of our R, L and D, so after a few days of struggle, most people get a good handle on it. One could claim that learning grammar and sentence structure is difficult, because it's completely opposite, but on the other hand, it's that backwards-ness that makes it easy. I can take English, put it completely backwards based on a few rules, and I have Japanese structure. Honestly though, the longer I spent with Japanese, the easier it became to think "backwards". And I think, that the longer Japanese people spent with English, the easier they'd be able to think "backwards" as well.
Yes, 6 is too young to be deciding your future, let alone anything really, but so is 18. I'm not sure about you, but I had no freaking idea what I wanted to do with myself at 18. It's only recently that I've starting to form a solid idea of my future. So no, I don't think it should be mandatory education in the school systems, but I do think people should be exposed to a proper accent of English, no matter where it originates, but only, only if Japan actually wants to improve it's stance on the TOEFL, and similar tests. I'm not sure all of Japan would join together on that really. "We're Japanese! Why do we need to speak English?! Leave that to the English! They do it best!"
I really don't know how it is for doctors over there in Japan, but is it really that necessary for them to be fluent in English? It seems like it would be too demanding on such a young person to have to learn both fluent English as well as medical practice at the same time, and if asked to choose which I would rather have them learn, it would be the medical practice, hands down. We can always find an interpreter if worse comes to worst.
I suppose you could say a student can only learn as much as their teacher knows. So perhaps, instead of the students, you should require a certain level of TOEFL for English teachers?
Sorry for the length. :<
That and my poor debating abilities. :l
I think I understood your point in the second paragraph. Teaching a foreign language could be something like accepting the foreign culture and replace your own with it, if it goes to an extreme, right?
Japanese people try to 'eat' English-speaking culture, and if their own culture is not strong enough, they might be eaten back by English-speaking culture. Surely, English-speaking culture is very strong; Many countries have been eaten already! It's good to know that there is a similar fear in the US.
Again, I don't think all Japanese people have to speak fluent English. Perhaps, given the above issue, one need to establish his/her cultural root before learning a foreign language. Otherwise, the foreign language is not a foreign language per se; he/she is a just bilingual, bi-cultural person. Mixed, not pure. Wow, this is a very controversial issue.
As to Japanese pronunciation, I also thought it's easy for English speakers. Once I asked an English woman on Lang-8 who was in Japan for 2 years about it. To my surprise, she said that it was really difficult for her to pronounce Japanese words, almost as difficult as English pronunciation is for me. She said she tend to skip vowels and pronounce consonants consecutively, which is kind of understandable. Probably, as a beginner, Japanese pronunciation could be easy-peasy and you could make yourself understood in most cases, but if you become advanced, it may be become a lot harder; Natural accents and intonations are perhaps extremely difficult.
Clinical doctors in Japan don't use English in their daily job. They probably don't have to speak English at all. However, if he/she is a leading runner in the field, he/she must learn new methods and knowledge from literature, have to publish his/her own studies in English, and present own studies in international conferences. Otherwise, his/her new invention may be just neglected.
One who wants to go to graduate schools is already rather determined to be a researcher. If he or she wants to do science, he/she has got to compete with a lot of talented scientists overseas, most of whom can speak and write English quite fluently and decently. As regard to English usage in science, being a Japanese is a great disadvantage at moment. I think this must be changed.
Finally, I like the idea of using TOEFL tests for screening English teachers! I'm sure that they utterly hate this idea, though, hahaha.
but I believe the article "the" is needed - especially because there are several
types of TOEFL tests.
You are required to answer questions in English and speak
into a microphone.
NOTE: More than one question is involved, so the plural is probably better.
". . . with scientists of other countries". An more compact wording would be
". . . .with scientists worldwide".
The notion of "word economy" (concision) seems to be one of the hardest things
to learn in any language.
You are asked to answer a question in English and speak into a microphone.
Your answer is recorded on the computer, and later is examined by the scorers. on is better, but in would be OK.
Japanese people are notorious for their not very wonderful speaking and listening abilities in English.
As we would expect from this test format, in 2010 the average TOEFL iBT score of native Japanese speakers, which are almost equivalent to Japanese people, was 69 and ranked 104th among speakers of 113 languages.
Interesting - how do Japanese do when learning languages from places closer to them, like Korean and Chinese?
Good question. But unfortunately, I haven't learnt either of those languages, so I can't really answer your question.
People say learning Korean is easy-peasy compared to learning English. :)
As to the TOEFL scores, please note that the test is designed for those who want to study at university in English-speaking countries. Thus the score is not directly reflecting English skills of the average Japanese people. It's more about people in high eduction.
These countries are all ranked within top 20.
Hungarian is also known to be grammatically far from English, but their score is not bad (30th in country ranking; 26tg in native-language based ranking).
Although Hungarians do put their family names first!
In other words, they are only similar in that they're far from English. According to my amateur wikipedia study, they are not in the same language family. Moreover, it is not unclear that Japanese and Korean can be included in Altaic languages.
┌Indo-European languages
│
├Uralic Languages
│ └Finno-Ugric
│ └Ugric
│ └Hungarian
│
└Altaic Languages
├Mongolian
├(Japanese) ?
└(Korean) ?
"a question" to either "questions" (plural) or else "each question".
I think it would be a good idea for students to have more opportunities to practice English skills. But the thing about tests is the students might revise hard in preparation for them, but after they've passed, they might not continue studying.
But the students in graduate schools of natural science must use English anyway to publish their study in journals by the end of their course. They have to use English but they don't practise. That's the current status.
I think something like language study is difficult to properly implement in a school curriculum because classes only last for an hour or so and that isn't enough time to effectively learn I think. A student is only going to be thinking about English, for example, for an hour every three days (depending on their timetable) so their English ability will not improve steadily.
They have to keep worrying about the TOEFL tests quite in advance. Most of them will take actions on their own. After entering graduate schools, they have to use it actually. So they'll keep practicing hopefully.
Otherwise, graduate students never have an opportunity to learn speech in English until they actually speak in an international conference. That's apparently too late.
TOEFL iBT (an English test) scores of Japanese speakers rank 104th of speakers of 113 languages
Each of the Listening, Speaking, Reading, and Writing sections have a maximum score of 30 scores and the total possible score is 120.
You are required to answer a question in English and speak into a microphone.
Unfortunately, half of the total score of TOEFL iBT comes from speaking and listening.
As we expect from this test format, in 2010, the average TOEFL iBT score of native Japanese speakers, which are a good representation of all Japanese people, was 69 and ranked the 104th of speakers of 113 languages.
In particular, the average score for the Speaking section of Japanese-speaking people was the worst in the world, which tells you something.
Instead of carrying out traditional paper tests mostly evaluating translation abilities, it may be better to set a minimum TOEFL iBT score to allow one to take the entrance exams.
If they want to be scientific researchers, they need to learn those skills anyway to communicate with scientists from (or in) other countries.
I think it is somewhat surprising that Japan ranks so low since many Japanese people have about 10 years (middle school, high school, university) of English classes by the time they finish school. I know that there are some issues with the content (it focuses too much on small grammar and not enough on conversation, etc.), but I'd still think Japan would rank a bit higher.
Of course hardly any Americans speak anything other than English, so it is kind of hard for most Americans to really understand these issues.
There is another English test run by the same company; the TOEFL test is designed for non-academic people. It covers more news paper-related and business-oriented vocabularies. Importantly it doesn't include speaking test. The ranking of Japan seems to be not bad for TOEIC. The data I found on the Internet says Japan was the number 6 in 1996.
The test takers of TOEFL iBT may also need to be considered. They are not randomly chosen, so there should be a sampling bias. It could be possible that too many Japanese people take TOEFL iBT tests while only a few top elites take the exam in other countries.
But in my experience so far in academia, the TOEFL score ranking seems to be quite reasonable to be honest. It's difficult to find a overseas scientist who can't speak English better than most Japanese scientists.
I am fascinated with the diverse washback patterns that standardized tests such as the TOEFL have on learners worldwide. Since of my research interests is statistics, one thing to be aware of when reporting "Japan is 104th of speakers of 113 languages" in
terms of TOEFL scores is the vast difference in sample sizes: many of the countries with "high" scoring rankings have a very small number of TOEFL examinees. Japan has a huge number. Since the TOEFL is a based on a Gaussian distribution, it is therefore no surprise that Japan's average TOEFL score is also close to the statistical mean.
So, yes, the shocking result is exaggerating.
However, even in Japan, not everybody has a TOEFL test. And Koreans and Chinese have better scores. It's still rather shocking to me.