Foreign Language Education for Sustainable Development: Teaching Japanese not only as a Strategy but as a Catalyst of World Peace

Abstract

When most English teachers teach English to Japanese students in Japan, they think "How can we teach communicative English as efficiently as possible?" In a broader sense, do teachers of other subjects think in the same way? There are some individuals who rapidly improve their communicative Japanese proficiency. They can live without feeling quite so uncomfortable in just a short period of time after arriving in Japan without any knowledge of Japanese language. The situation is not the same but such cases cannot be seen in Japanese learners of English even if they would be living in English speaking countries. With this idea in mind, this work examines the meaning and purpose of teaching and studying a foreign language and its culture. The results of the questionnaire will show that the language learners want to study everything surrounding their language in order to master it. Furthermore, they hope that learning a foreign language and its culture will contribute to world peace and education for sustainable development.