TOEIC in Japan : People go crazy getting high score.

Have you ever heard of TOEIC before ? I would say that those whose mother language is not English would say yes because it is supposed to be able to measure your English skill, although it does not look working well actually. So this time, I'm going to telly you how TOEIC test works in Japan, including good things and bad things. I hope you are able to find out how it works.

What is the TOEIC ?

TOEIC is abbreviation of "Test Of English for International Communication". It is supposed to evaluate your English skill, and it is popular internationally, especially in Asia.  However, be careful for its name. If you hear of this name, you imagine that it is a test to your reading, writing, listening, speaking skills. It's not actually, and it test only reading and listening skills. It is becoming a important problem right now in Japan, which I am going to write about and needs to be changed immediately in terms of education restructure as well as required English skills.

TOECI is a very popular English test. But why is that ?

English skill has already become one of required skills when you get a job in Japan. Not all companies, but many Japanese companies are doing business all over the world. Especially, electronics, car, and steal companies are selling a lot of their products around the world, although electronics companies are not doing as well as they used to do a few decades ago. Regardless say, companies which is a Japanese brach of international companies take English skill for granted, and speaking English is common sense. Recently, many Japanese companies are requiring English skill for their job applicants and are using TOEIC to see applicants English skill. It is not only job application but also requirement of promotion. Some companies require certain score of TOEIC for promotion. So this is why TOEIC is very popular and many people are desperate for high score. If you go to language block of bookstores in Japan, you will see many books specialized for getting high TOEIC score. So this is environmental driven study rather than self driven study. So many people do study English for TOEIC but not for being able to use English for communication, despite that TOEIC is a test for international communication ironically.

Good points of English

No matter how you study, studying English itself is a good thing to be able to become international person and expand your opportunity in the future. It's better than nothing actually. As I mention, reading and listening skills are evaluated in TOEIC, so it is useful when you read books written in English and listening English news, although watching movies without English subtitle is obviously a different story because English used in TOEIC is a beautiful and correct in terms of grammar as well as accent, however English in movies are different. If you want to be able to do it, you will need to learn slang and get used to wide variety of accent of people. Anyway, if you study English for TOEIC, your will be able to get foundation of English skill in terms of reading and listening.

What is a problem with TOEIC ?

Many people have already notice a problem of TOEIC which measure skills of reading and listening. The problem is that high score of TOEIC does not necessarily guarantee high speaking skill. It's obvious from the nature of the test. For example, one of my colleagues is doing very good at TOEIC and his score is almost perfect but his speaking sucks actually because he studies English only for TOEIC. Many companies are facing a problem that they hire applicants with high TOEIC score but applicants are not able to speak. Here is another problem which is responsibility of interviewers. Interviewers evaluate English skill just by TOEIC score and do not test speaking test. In my opinion, if companies really want people with high English skill, interviewers definitely needs to do free conversation in English in order to see if applicants tell what they want to say in English. If companies announce that they do it during interview, then applicants like university students practice speaking desperately. As a result of that, English skills of applicants would go up totally, which is a very good point for Japanese economics in the future. Needless to say, there would be one concern of if interviewers are able to do conversation in English.

How do we improve it ?

My opinion is that speaking skill should be introduced to entrance exam of high school, university, and job interview. In current situation, reading skill is already tested for all, but other skills are tested at small percentage of all. This is nature of human being but if something is required for entrance exam or interview, then people usually practice it and become better at it. Let's take advantage of nature of human being. In order to do this, many improvements are necessary. For example, many English teachers in Japan are able to teach English grammer but are not able to talk in English. That's really ironic but it's is a fact unfortunately. So they need to be trained. Regarding speaking skill, it would be very difficult to quantify its skill actually, which is depending on how its skill is evaluated. Especially it is hard to be introduced in entrance exam because entrance exam test should be tested fairly. So it would be easier to introduce it at job interview first of all because job interview is people to people matching test, and if interviewers say yes, it's ok.

Here, I briefly explain the situation of TOEIC in Japan, and I hope you can understand what is happening in Japan about English.