Over Two Decades of Elementary School English Education in Japan : Challenges as Viewed in the Literature

Elementary school English education in Japan has recently entered its third decade. This paper aims to analyse Japanese-language literature related to the first two decades in terms of the objectives of the research papers, their methods, their results and the challenges they name, to identify commonalities and differences between them, and thus to make the findings easily accessible to a non-Japanese audience. 68 Japanese-language studies of elementary school English education are grouped into three categories by the stage of implementation they address. After analysing each stage, conclusions are drawn regarding their key characteristics, the successes of each period as well as the recurring challenges that are mentioned throughout.