Learning English Because of the Olympics?: A Critical Inquiry

Abstract

This chapter examines how “English monolingualism” is promoted to the Japanese general public through mass media in relation to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. The author employs Critical Discourse Analysis (cf. van Dijk, in Discourse and power. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, UK, 2008; Chilton, in Analysing political discourse. Routledge, London, 2004) to reveal the discursive mechanism that promotes English monolingualism as though it were the only foreign language people in Japan should learn. The author discusses the phenomena referring to Murata’s studies in Critical Discourse Analysis (Pragmatics 8:501–514, 1998; The Journal of Asia TEFL 1:243–266, 2004) and English as a lingua franca (ELF) (JACET Journal 63:7–26, 2019) in order to recognize her contribution to applied linguistics over the past decades. The analysis of policy papers issued by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Sciences and Technology (MEXT) has revealed that globalization, or even the 2020 Tokyo Olympics is used as a reason for people for promoting English at schools and universities, despite the fact that there is no direct connection between them. Being exposed to limited information through media discourses which would affect the formulation of one’s belief, the learners do not have enough options from which s/he can decide which language to learn. Finally, the chapter provides readers with some suggestions that we should constantly monitor the information available to us, keeping it updated, in order to make the right decision about learning foreign languages.