An online exchange between university-level language learners in Japan and Australia

Abstract

<p>For the past few decades, English has been an integral part of the national curriculum in Japan for students in junior and senior high school. In 2019, curriculum reforms saw the expansion of elementary school English education so that now all students in the third and fourth grades are exposed to English through language ac-tivities, and in the fifth and sixth grades it is now a formal and assessed subject area (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology [MEXT], 2018).<br/> In Australia, despite now having a national curriculum, the implementation of education programs is the mandate of the various states and territories (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority [ACARA], 2014). Since the develop-ment of the National Policy on Languages (Lo Bianco, 1987), language education has played some role, to varying degrees, in the education of students in Australia, al-though any compulsory period generally ends around the eighth year of schooling, but only around 12％ of students, and in some states as low as 5％, continue lan-guage study to the end of high school (Poyatos Matas & Mason, 2015).</p>