Why is it Important to Teach in Mixed Language Teaching Approaches?

An increasing number of international students whose culture of teaching and learning practices are very different from that of the UK are now studying under a teaching approach which originated in Anglophone countries. This study poses the question of whether Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) is still considered to be a universally effective and appropriate approach to multicultural students regardless of cultural variations. This paper investigates whether the Japanese teaching method (Japanisation), which is presented as an alternative teaching method to CLT, gives any influence on multicultural students in Japanese language teaching at a university in the South of England. The concept of Japanisation is drawn from a study of the Japanese car manufacturing industry and transferred into the language teaching context. The study was conducted for one semester during the 2009/2010 academic year. Two teaching methods, Japanisation and CLT, were applied. Three tests which produced quantitative data were used. The quantitative results showed that there was no statistically significant differences between the two teaching approaches regarding the results of the first two tests. However, Japanisation was associated with significantly higher results in the third and final test, compared with CLT.