Is there a benefit to skipping the teaching of uppercase letters?
I read a while ago in a publication that 90%+ of all English is in lowercase and too much time and misguided energy is put on uppercase letters to preschool learners and it can confuse or slow the process.
If I am teaching for only a limited amount of time a week at a preschool I want to teach on the lowercase to speed up and simplify the learning process. Is this advisable? Anyone have experience with this ? I tried to search for relevant research but found nothing.
Appreciate any thoughts
15 comments
What does the schools curriculum say?
Please don’t. My high schoolers have enough trouble remembering when to use uppercase letters as it is. Proper capitalization is important in writing lol, most letters may be lowercase but that doesn’t mean that capital letters can be skipped over or ignored because they are always used where they’re supposed to be used.
It’d be kind of like teaching Hiragana but not Katakana. Not quite the same, there’s no *direct* Japanese equivalent, but they’re two sets of characters that represent the same sounds and both are used and seen regularly in their respective language. Learning one is just as easy as learning the other, and you *do* need to learn both.
You can’t skip teaching upper case. It’s going to confuse the kids even more when they eventually see that there are upper case letters too which make the same sound as the lower case.
I’d teach upper and lower case together as a set at first. I.e. teach A and a at the same time. They are preschoolers, you don’t need to rush through anything. Go slowly and give them a solid base to work with in the future.
At preschool level I wouldn’t worry. Trust me that Japanese kids will have plenty of time to practice both alphabets in the future. Out of 600+ students in my school, only one has trouble writing letters and I’m pretty sure he just needs practice for confidence. I’d follow whatever they are learning at the time.
Kids learn upper and lower case in the 3rd grade. They need uppercase to learn how to use a keyboard.
My ex, Japanese, who was fluent in English, had difficulties reading my notes if I used uppercase letters exclusively, which I usually do. She would otherwise read English handwriting just fine. Thought I’d leave that anecdote here.
Uppercase letters are easier to write and less likely to be perceived incorrectly.
D and B vs. d and b
While lower case and upper case have meaning, most english letters used in Japanese signs are upper case. If they only learn one case, they will benefit more from Uppercase letters, in the same way if a non japanese speaker only learned katakana.
I’d say learn them together if you can, just because some look very similar to their upper case counterparts but things like E and G are so different!
I highly recommend looking into the Jolly Phonics program. It has everything laid out, starting with lowercase letters and then goes into uppercase. Absolutely a game changer. I’m considering going back to Japan just so I can try to either work for the jolly phonics branch in Tokyo, or start my own, because I loved it so much (and my students loved how easy English became once they could read and write it!) and believe in it 1000%.
You ought to ask people who specialize in ECE about introducing phonics alphabets.
Teaching Young Learners (TYL SIG) in JALT might have advice for you.
Not enough time is spent on reading and writing in general.
The first thing Japan /should/ cut is its performative listen and copy conversational English in favor OF more reading and writing.
I do what I can in elementary school to get kids thinking about letter names, sounds, combinations, vowels, consonants etc. But it is very much bogged down by the conversational stuff.
If anything, it’s fun to elucidate how much smaller the the full alphabet set is compared to hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Then you show the fun points of where Japan and English overlap:
Mizuumi kanji becomes —kou because how you read it can be different from what it’s called.
Well gee whizz: B has a name, but it also has a sound. We’ve established a connection.
Obviously this is a haphazard unprofessional reddit comment, but the point is establishing connections and working on fundamentals is how you get better at anything from push-ups to house building.
The absolute state of English in Japan.
“Just skip capital letters.” “Only learn capital letters because most of the English in Japan is in capital letters only.”
My god.
Just teach them and have them fill out tracing sheets for homework to learn the letters. Cover the rules once and correct it as it comes up later, it’s not that much time.
Just a random question on the topic but, why teach them writing at all? Don’t they learn it later on in school anyway? I get the feeling that it’s simply because it’s easier to show it off to parents. Oh look, little Takeshi wrote his name 🙂
A thought: Why even teach preschoolers the alphabet? Half of the 5 year olds can’t even write the hiragana legibly.