Longstanding rumours that the Japanese government are thinking of doing away with JET (the famous scheme for putting foreign graduates into schools as “human tape recorders” or “genki” sources of fun and games) have been followed by news that the British government’s cuts will lead to the scrapping of a similar scheme run by the British Council in Europe that once had JK Rowling, Alastair Campbell, Rory Bremner and Angus Deayton starring as the random foreigner in classrooms in France.
Does it matter? Isn’t it better to just spend the money on further training for the real (i.e. local) teachers, such as sending them to the US for a year as the Japanese government is apparently thinking about doing?
The Japanese are more comfortable around foreigners than the Koreans who are from the sticks and so don’t yet have foreign language assistants, but it certainly hasn’t boosted the language skills of the Japanese one jot. In fact, it is arguable that it has reinforced the image that English is something that belongs to native speakers, and it is noticeable that the most successful learners of English are in Denmark, Sweden and Holland, where the focus is absolutely on progressive methodology by expert local teachers rather than bringing in 23 year old Yanks, Aussies or Brits.
Showing kids that English is actually a language that can be used for real communication rather than just an academic subject is a good thing, but that can just as easily be done with Skype to classes in other countries or penpals. If it is going to be done with someone in the classroom, surely it should be a person who has successfully learnt the language rather than a native speaker, and someone from a country that students know little about rather than an American. If those people could be from a really wide range of countries and so the Japanese get several hundred students who know everything about Estonia, Fiji and Bolivia, all the better.
The original story on the British scheme is here:
Century Old Teaching Programme Suspended after Spending Cuts
TEFLtastic 
The continued funding could easily be allocated if some kind of tax were placed on banks. Also, if I had wings I might well be able to fly.
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Even though it means losing opportunities, I do strongly support training local teachers rather than bringing in foreigners. Honestly, I’m not sure it’s bringing in foreigners that’s a problem, it’s bringing in foreigners with no background in language teaching and who have never learned a foreign language themselves.
Another danger I’ve often wondered about though is that, without the foreigners, there’s no push for communicative teaching. I think there’s a very good chance many teachers would simply continuing teaching grammar in L1. I can count the number of local teachers I’ve seen that teach in L2 on one hand.
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