While I don’t have any experience teaching in College/University I have extensive teaching experience in Taiwan primarily in Private and Public elementary and junior high schools. I have found that schools promote the idea of communicative teaching superficially. Schools say they will use the communicative method to recruit new students. Administrators claim their program is more interesting and will lead to increased fluency. They end up hiring teachers with this type of training. In reality these same schools set up their curriculum and systems based on the Yakudoku system you mentioned. I believe they do this because of the national testing system and because it is the system used in all other departments of the school. The underlying belief is that the only way to pass these tests is by rote memorization or that this is the way it has always been done. Teachers often meet with resistance from administrators and colleagues when they try to implement the communicative methods they believe they were hired to teach. They are told they can’t control their classes and that the students can’t learn this way. The result is that many teachers eventually leave, start teaching by rote or create a hybrid type of system that mixes the two systems.

There is a locally-derived method of teaching. It involves the memorization of vocabulary lists, grammar drills, and motivation through testing. It resembles a method of teaching called audio-lingual, once widely used in the West. It is more accurately described by the Japanese term yakudoku.

Some researchers believe the growing use of Western communicative teaching methods is based in their association with ‘advanced’ Western culture. This is the origin of the debates we’ve had here about English teaching and imperialism. I believe this is not true. Communicative methods are adopted because they are more interesting and more effective at producing language proficiency.

Yakudoku is not popular among students. It is boring, and most of all does not work very well. We are all familiar with the concept of local English teachers who can not communicate in English. From a policy point of view this is important because it gets around the problem of a shortage of sufficiently proficient teachers. The demand for foreign teachers and overseas study to deal with this is so strong that it has serious economic effects.

Does this answer your question?