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Interview guides and a questionnaire were developed in order to find what f actors demotivated students in Japanese high school English classrooms. Five college students who were attending two private universities and one public university shared their views about demotivation in the interviews. Forty-two students at a public university responded to a questionnaire consisting of mainly open-ended response questions. Through qualitative analysis five factors were found: (1) individual teacher behavior in classroom; (2) the grammar—translation method used in instruction; (3) tests and university entrance examinations; (4) the memorization nature of vocabulary learning; and (5) textbook/reference book-related issues. It is hoped that these learners’ stories will help Japanese and other teachers to realize what pitfalls to avoid in their instruction.

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■ The Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology issues a document known as the Course of Study Guidelines on average once every ten years. This document states the overall and specific goals for English education in Japanese junior and senior high schools including specifying the contents of ministry approved textbooks. This study looks at the influence these guidelines have had on classroom pedagogy from the point of view of the student. For this study 112 college freshmen were surveyed shortly after they had been admitted into several private universities in the Tokyo area, responding to both closed-response and open-response questions about their perceptions of classroom practice in each of the six English courses defined in the guidelines. In the closed-response questionnaire, students were asked to rate various items related to teaching. In the open-response questionnaire, students were asked to describe the teaching practice of their English teachers. Standard descriptive statistics were used to analyse the quantitative data. The study gives insights into the successes and failures of the guideline's curriculum revisions. It is a response to call for the further study by Nunan (2003) and helps to show the complicated gap between educational policies and actual teaching practice in Japan.

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