Sophia University Junior College Division Faculty Journal
創立 40 周年記念 第 35 号, 2014, 119-126

English Essentials: concept, genesis, and placein the curriculum
Chris Oliver
As one of only a very small handful of books that all students are expected tohave and use during their two years of study at the Sophia University Junior College
Division, English Essentials: An Academic Skills Handbook is more than a familiar sightaround campus. It is the sole text that is shared among all Required English (EnglishI-IV) courses, and the only single text that students are likely to be called upon toconsult in courses in each semester from the time they enter the Junior College Division
until they graduate. The book was, moreover, produced by faculty of the school with
our own students’ abilities and needs in mind. The book in this sense plays a uniquely
unifying role in the curriculum, but, as a “supplementary” course text, is constrained in
how it does so. In the pages that follow, I provide a brief portrait of the general “concept”
of the book, as well as of its genesis and usage, with an eye toward what might be instore for its future.

Basic concept of English Essentials: what it is, and isn’t
As noted in the section of the book’s Preface addressed specifically to students,
English Essentials “covers some of the important skills that we want you [students]
to develop in you English studies” at the Junior College Division, including speaking,writing, research, and critical thinking. Further down the page, the section of thePreface written for teachers notes that the book focuses “primarily, but not exclusively,on ‘expressive’ English skills that we consider important” for all of our students,
regardless of their English ability level. The book is thus clearly limited in scope: while
it aims to help students acquire some key skills in English – “essentials” in this regard –the bulk of it is devoted to skills that are directly related to students’ expressive abilityin English.
This is borne out by the major sections of the book – Speaking, Writing, Research,and Critical Thinking – and by the constituent chapters of each, as shown below.

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Chris OliverSpeaking
1. Conversation
2. Speech
3. Presentation
4. VisualsWriting
5. The Writing Process
6. Paragraph Writing
7. Essay Writing

Research
8. Research
9. Note-taking and Citations
10. Plagiarism
Critical Thinking
11. Critical Thinking
12. Six Thinking Hats: Applied CriticalThinking

While undoubtedly none of the English faculty at the Junior College Division would
argue that receptive English skills are non-essential in students’ academic careers –indeed, these are all that is currently gauged by the all-important (in Japan) TOEIC test
– the book itself does not attempt to offer instruction in, say, key aspects of academic
listening or reading non-fiction in English. This was a deliberate choice, both to reflect
the emphasis on “expressive ability” ( 発信する能力 ) as a key aspect of the identity of
the Junior College Division’s English program – as stated on the school website and inpromotional materials distributed to prospective students – and, for more pragmatic
reasons, to make the book more feasible to produce in-house.
Also noted in the Preface to the book is that English Essentials is “meant to be ahandbook more than a conventional textbook” in the sense that its chapters are devoted
primarily to explaining key points about certain English skills, and doing so in a fairly
compact manner. (See Figure 1 for a sample page from the book.) On average, eachchapter is only eight and a half pages long. The Conversation chapter, for instance, does
not set out to reproduce the multitude of issues and objectives that might be covered ina typical textbook aimed a cultivating students’ all-around conversational proficiency inEnglish. Instead, it provides students with a manageable, useful set of strategies thatthey can employ – both inside and outside the classroom – for initiating, maintaining,developing, and closing conversational interactions. Textbooks typically include not only
explanation but also tend to allocate much page space to readings, exercises, activities,and so on. English Essentials does include some of these, but on the whole the book isweighted toward concise explanation and illustration of key skills. It is in this sense thatthe book is intended to serve as a “handbook” rather than a typical textbook.

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Figure 1. Sample page from English Essentials.
Another important aspect of the “concept” of English Essentials is that although its
twelve chapters are numbered from 1 to 12 in the table of contents, the chapters “wereconceived and written as modules, as more-or-less free-standing units that do not need
to be taught sequentially,” as the book’s Preface puts it. In some cases, of course, skills
covered in one chapter presuppose proficiency in skills covered in another chapter: forinstance, the Essay Writing chapter is built on the assumption that students alreadyhave an understanding of the fundamentals of paragraph writing, as discussed in theParagraph Writing chapter. Moreover, there are numerous other linkages between skills
covered in the various chapters: e.g., the basics of essay organization (Essay Writingchapter) can prove useful to students working on the organization of an academic

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Chris Oliverpresentation (Presentation chapter). In order to make such linkages explicit and easy tofind in the book, a special icon is used at appropriate places within the text to visually
direct students to specific chapters or pages where directly relevant information can befound. In this way, the vision was for students to be able to pick up the book and delve
into a chapter without necessarily having had to first digest and “master” the content of
the chapters preceding it.
Finally, the intended use of the book is an essential aspect of the book. Again, as
the Preface puts it: “The book is intended to serve as a skills-oriented supplement tothe content-oriented textbooks or other materials that teachers select and use in theirRequired English courses (English I-IV).” Beginning with the 2011 pilot edition of thebook, it has very clearly been presented to English I-IV teachers as a supplement totheir primary course materials, one they may use in the way and degree to which theyfind suitable to their own courses and students. Since 2011, English Essentials has thus
been listed as a supplementary work ( 参考書 ) in the official shared syllabus for English I,
II, III, and IV courses.

Genesis of the bookAs the Preface of the book indicates, English Essentials “was born out of an
Educational Innovation Program grant from Sophia School Corporation (Jōchi Gakuin)
and the collaborate efforts of the full-time English faculty of the Sophia University
Junior College Division.” The Educational Innovation Program grant spanned threeyears, 2009 to 2011, and was aimed at bolstering the “content-oriented and selfexpressive” ( 内 容 重 視 お よ び 自 己 発 信 型 ) character of the Junior College Division’s
Required English program. The grant application specified various Faculty Development
and other activities to be carried out, but the development of English Essentials
consumed the vast majority of faculty labor under the grant, with twelve full-time
English faculty working on the development the book – planning, drafting, revising,proofing, etc. – over those three years. And, particularly for subsidizing the initialprinting costs of the book, English Essentials consumed the vast majority of the grantbudget as well.
It is important to situate the development of the “Innovation Book” – as it wasoften called until we eventually came up with a title – in relation to a major curriculum
change that had taken place a few years prior. Namely, over a two-year period startingin 2007, the current “core” Required English courses (English I-IV) were phased in,─ 122 ─

English Essentials: concept, genesis, and place in the curriculum

supplanting their predecessors, which were called English Comprehension 1 & 2 andEnglish Expression 1 & 2. In a departure from the overt skills-orientation as suggested
by English Expression and English Comprehension, the new Required English courses
were to be theme-based and content-oriented, with individual lessons during thesemester to be based on materials tied to a general theme for the course, as follows:
English I. Living with others: exploring relationships and life values
English II. Crossing cultures: understanding and respecting othersEnglish III. Social issues in Japan: toward a better community
English IV. Japan and the world: living in an international community
Likewise, the general course goals for English I-IV were formulated so as to reflect thisemphasis on content:・For students to gain an understanding of a wide range of issues in order tobecome responsible global citizens who embody the spirit of “Women for Others,
With Others”
・For students to acquire critical thinking skills
・For students to acquire abilities to understand others and express themselves
effectively in English・For students to acquire knowledge and skills to become autonomous learners ofEnglishOutside of these general course goals, published and made available to students
in the official course syllabi, teachers of Required English were told that English I-IV
were intended to be “integrated-skills” courses that provide students with a balanced
mix of reading, listening, writing, and speaking skills development. Beyond that, it wasby and large left up to individual teachers of English I-IV to decide which particular
sets of skills would be taught or otherwise developed in their own courses. There wasno mandate that, for instance, all teachers of English I should provide instruction
in paragraph writing, or that all teachers of English II should provide instruction inpresentation skills, in the process of conducting theme-based, content-oriented lessons.
It has remained this way since, with the effect of leaving the skills element of Required
English less clearly defined than the thematic element.
The development of English Essentials can be seen as an effort toward helping to─ 123 ─Chris Oliver

remedy this seeming imbalance. The book in itself does not provide a “mandate” forhow or at what stages in students’ academic careers particular skills are to be taught.
Nevertheless, it does provide to teachers and students alike a more distilled, more
unified sense of the productive skills that we feel are essential for students to acquire. In
a sense, it represents a step toward recuperating some of what was lost in the conceptual
shift in the English curriculum from a “skills” orientation to a “content” orientation.

Supplementary usage
As noted above, since 2011 English Essentials has been provided to teachers ofRequired English as a skills-oriented supplement to the textbooks or other materials
that they use in their own English I-IV courses. Given the range of English ability
levels of students in Required English courses and the proclivities of individual teachers
toward teaching some skills rather than others, it is unsurprising – as we have seenfrom in-house surveys – that there has been variation among teachers about how andhow much English Essentials gets utilized for any given English I-IV course, or thatcertain chapters tend to get used more than others.
At the end of the 2012 academic year, for instance, second-year students weresurveyed about their usage of the individual English Essentials chapters during theirfour semesters of study at the Junior College Division. Figure 2 shows the results
collected from 166 students about their usage of the book in class (not out-of-classautonomous study), with the chapters placed in order of most- to least-heavily used.
According to students’ recollections, the three writing-related chapters were mostheavily used, with more than 100 students saying that they had used the ParagraphWriting chapter in class at least once and nearly 50 reporting that they had used it
three or more times in class. Of course, we might note that approximately one-quarterof the students responded that they either did not use that same chapter at all or do notremember. For seven of the twelve chapters, more than half the students replied thatthey either did not use the chapter or do not remember.

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Figure 2. Question: “Over the past two years, which chapters in English
Essentials have you studied in class with your teacher?” Horizontal axis
shows number of students. (Table reformatted using data from Andrade,
2013; not every student provided an answer regarding each chapter.)In the same survey, another question asked students about their usage of the book outof class; roughly 20% of students reported having used at least one chapter for their own
self-study outside of class.
Surely these numbers would be much higher if English Essentials were a required
text for all English I-IV courses. But even as a supplementary text, with no stringent
guidelines to teachers about how the book is to be used, it would seem that the book has
been getting a fair amount of use.

Next steps
While the long-term future of English Essentials is yet to be determined, at the timeof this writing it is undergoing a round of minor revision for the 2014 academic year,
when it will again serve as a supplementary text for Required English. For the time
being, English Essentials will continue to serve as the sole unifying text for English I-IV,
but at the same time remain constrained in how it can do so in that there is no uniformly
prescribed manner for how the book is to be used, with the result that a number of─ 125 ─Chris Oliverchapters may end up not getting the attention they deserve. Most likely, I suspect, thenext significant step for English Essentials or something else in its place will come withanother major reform in the English curriculum.

References
Andrade, M. (2012). Second-year students’ feedback on English Essentials: An AcademicSkills Handbook for SUJCD Students. Report distributed at the February 5, 2013,
English Teachers’ Symposium, Sophia University Junior College Division, Hadano,Japan.
English Essentials: An Academic Skills Handbook. (2012). Department of English
Language, Sophia University Junior College Division. Hadano, Japan.

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