The initial motivation for what turned into my dissertation research and this book was a perceived failure; my colleague and I tried, and failed, to engage the in-service teachers who attended compulsory Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) seminars. Initially, I thought that our failure lay in our lack of familiarity with the participants' teaching contexts and, to a lesser extent, in the short period of time we had to prepare.

However, as my research suggests, the problems lay much deeper than time frames or familiarity. As designed, the seminars embodied a heavy emphasis on improving English proficiency rather than stimulating holistic teacher development; consequently, the existing (and substantial) expertise of the in-service teachers we were working with was marginalised. MEXT's approach to teacher development was based on the belief that the most important factor for good English language teaching is linguistic proficiency, or content knowledge, and that this knowledge should take precedence over other professional knowledge and skills.

The Action Plan: Japanese with English Abilities

The seminar which Hitomi and I gave was a component of a major government initiative ('action plan'), that mandated the participation of all public in-service junior and senior high school teachers of English in Japan in an intensive teacher training seminar once in the five-year period from 2003 to 2007 (MEXT, 2003). Beyond the sheer scale of the people involved (approximately 60,000 in-service teachers; Takahashi, 2004), the compulsory seminar requirement was also unprecedented in terms of the speed with which it was enforced: approximately five months after it was introduced ('Eigo kyouin kennshu program: sono zenyou, English teachers' training programme: its overview', 2003; Takahashi, 2004).