I found this problem in a facebook group today. Made me think of the issues of Learning the Kanji where people learn the meaning of kanji but not the reading or how to use them. This is like a reverse problem, where you can only read but can’t understand.
Phonics needs to be done in tandem with actual language usage to build an implicit system for it to work with. Not sure why this is controversial but some people seem to lose their minds over this. I also say this as a dyslexic who tried applying first language phonetic style studying I received in my l1 to my l2 learning and lost thousands of dollars doing so. My own survey of successful dyslexic learners for my masters thesis also confirms this.
Also this is the best presentation of what’s happening in the brain during reading.
Final rant: Its not grammar vs phonetics but getting actual use in and teaching grammar and phonics in a way the supports the development of a communicative language system.
So they can read and pronounce the words, but they don’t know what the sentences mean? I assume that he means they don’t have the understanding of grammar or vocabulary they need to read whatever it is he is having them read.
This is an example of how someone might think they are teaching, but the reality is that they just don’t have enough methodological or pedagogical knowledge to chose the best approach or carry it out.
It’s hard to tell what went wrong exactly, but a couple of possibilities are that he read a couple of publications and launched into his “reading program” without really understanding the approach thoroughly enough, or else his execution of the approach was poor, e.g., the problem was at the level of the classroom activities he chose. Or both, maybe… I’ve seen beginner teachers make all of those mistakes, sometimes all at once.
At any rate, this exemplifies the issues involved when ALTs who aren’t teachers are nevertheless given teaching duties.
I wonder why his/her JTE just stood by and watched, without intervening, or at least advising? Surely the JTE could have help the ALT create the reading program so that it would align with whatever it was that the JTE was teaching?
I find it difficult to believe that 5 minutes twice a week had any sort of significant impact on their language development.
ES kids start learning ‘Romaji’ from the 3rd grade. English isn’t taught as a subject until the 5th grade. There is no official requirement for the students to read and write English in the 外国語活動 classes.
So kids here basically learn how to identify, read, write the English alphabet through the lens of the Japanese writing system for two years, and then suddenly from the 5th grade in English class, JTEs and ALTs are like “Your spelling is wrong, use Hepburn romanization. If you make a spelling mistake or attempt to spell an English word using romaji in this end of unit test, you lose points”.
Learning phonics and correct pronunciation is a must imo. Try asking somewhat what a word means when you can’t pronounce it. LOL
A native English teacher with limited time with students could do a lot worse than teaching them phonics. Of course, phonics alone will not get them fluent, but it’s an important skill that doesn’t get taught much by the Japanese teachers. Also, being able to read words you can’t understand is a sign of a good phonics education, it’s not inherently a problem; those kids will be better prepared to memorize and come to comprehend that new grammar and vocabulary they’re introduced to because of the phonics background.
Learning how to pronounce perfectly isn’t so bad. With continued study they can study vocab meaning. It’s only a problem if they stop studying at this level.
Teacher teaches phonics.
Kids learn phonics.
….
God bless him for caring. If someone only gave me 5 minutes twice a week, we’d sing some songs from Coco Melon and I’d correct their pronunciation tangentially, if time allowed.
Enunciation is the better net win in this situation. It’s much harder to get a HATSUON JOUZU DA NE from learning through their Japanese teachers, so you’re rounding them off in a way that they cannot. Let someone else supplement their vocabulary
As a bonus take home exercise for students, he can create a flash cards system for the school that gets suggested to the head sensei, is appreciated, but is ultimately ignored
Isn’t being able to read more than you can understand the norm? Even as an adult I come across words I can read but don’t know the meaning of. That’s how you build vocabulary independently, isn’t it? If they can now read well, it’s a good time to focus on that, even starting with very, very simple books. They’re quite old students, so to me, reading in English and then translating to Japanese something like an Oxford reading tree book would be a good way to get them using their reading skills and also acquiring new vocabulary.
Omg I’ve wanted to start something similar to this! I just didn’t know where I could find easy online books! There’s such a huge gap in the education system with lack of phonetics and readings. Tbh it feels like the schools are going through the motions rather than actually wanting to teach English.
I started phonics at the beginning of class as well and did mini lessons like quizzes if a word starts with R or L, but this time has gradually turned into playing abc games which tbh is really fun and often the highlight of the lesson for everyone so no stopping that.
When I did teach actual phonics the kids were like oooohhh naruhodo bc it helps connect dots of info they already have in their mind. But at this point I think I’ll just make a small curriculum for the 6ths graders to do at the end of the year as we often finish the textbook early. I would love to go into things like cvc patterns but without repetition and reading practice they will just forget it, and it’s hard too, as most teachers don’t even know it. My job is an English teacher, but I want to truly really teach someone English well which I feel like is impossible in public school system.
This is just a problem of learning a L2. Most native speakers can speak their native language fluently before they start reading. (It might be a four or five-year-old version of fluent, but I guarantee that is fluent.) So when a native speaker sounds out “c-a-t-” they eventually realize they’re saying “cat” and are satisfied they have read the word and know the meaning. If that same native speaker sounded out “catatonic” they probably would be just as confused as the Japanese kids. The main difference is that a native speaker not only has a larger vocabulary, they intuitively understand the grammar, too. A native English speaker will sound out “The cat is on the mat” and be satisfied with that sentence. A Japanese child who doesn’t know grammar (or not well) and certainly doesn’t know particles like “the” will maybe understand “cat” and maybe “on” if you’ve done that. And even if they know all of those vocabulary words, might still struggle to understand due to the different word order for English vs. Japanese.
I agree that katakana is a horrible system for teaching proper pronunciation to Japanese students, but it is also really helpful, too. And with five minutes to teach, anything is possible.
I’d just recommend only giving them materials they know the vocab for. Or, as others have said, focus on singing and games, and maybe just focus on speaking correctly vs. reading correctly. (Getting students to drop the “o” when saying ‘cat’ / カット took me a month of once a week, hour-long classes alone.)
13 comments
I found this problem in a facebook group today. Made me think of the issues of Learning the Kanji where people learn the meaning of kanji but not the reading or how to use them. This is like a reverse problem, where you can only read but can’t understand.
Phonics needs to be done in tandem with actual language usage to build an implicit system for it to work with. Not sure why this is controversial but some people seem to lose their minds over this. I also say this as a dyslexic who tried applying first language phonetic style studying I received in my l1 to my l2 learning and lost thousands of dollars doing so. My own survey of successful dyslexic learners for my masters thesis also confirms this.
Also this is the best presentation of what’s happening in the brain during reading.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gABVHQTcC-w&t=560s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gABVHQTcC-w&t=560s)
Final rant: Its not grammar vs phonetics but getting actual use in and teaching grammar and phonics in a way the supports the development of a communicative language system.
So they can read and pronounce the words, but they don’t know what the sentences mean? I assume that he means they don’t have the understanding of grammar or vocabulary they need to read whatever it is he is having them read.
This is an example of how someone might think they are teaching, but the reality is that they just don’t have enough methodological or pedagogical knowledge to chose the best approach or carry it out.
It’s hard to tell what went wrong exactly, but a couple of possibilities are that he read a couple of publications and launched into his “reading program” without really understanding the approach thoroughly enough, or else his execution of the approach was poor, e.g., the problem was at the level of the classroom activities he chose. Or both, maybe… I’ve seen beginner teachers make all of those mistakes, sometimes all at once.
At any rate, this exemplifies the issues involved when ALTs who aren’t teachers are nevertheless given teaching duties.
I wonder why his/her JTE just stood by and watched, without intervening, or at least advising? Surely the JTE could have help the ALT create the reading program so that it would align with whatever it was that the JTE was teaching?
I find it difficult to believe that 5 minutes twice a week had any sort of significant impact on their language development.
ES kids start learning ‘Romaji’ from the 3rd grade. English isn’t taught as a subject until the 5th grade. There is no official requirement for the students to read and write English in the 外国語活動 classes.
So kids here basically learn how to identify, read, write the English alphabet through the lens of the Japanese writing system for two years, and then suddenly from the 5th grade in English class, JTEs and ALTs are like “Your spelling is wrong, use Hepburn romanization. If you make a spelling mistake or attempt to spell an English word using romaji in this end of unit test, you lose points”.
Learning phonics and correct pronunciation is a must imo. Try asking somewhat what a word means when you can’t pronounce it. LOL
A native English teacher with limited time with students could do a lot worse than teaching them phonics. Of course, phonics alone will not get them fluent, but it’s an important skill that doesn’t get taught much by the Japanese teachers. Also, being able to read words you can’t understand is a sign of a good phonics education, it’s not inherently a problem; those kids will be better prepared to memorize and come to comprehend that new grammar and vocabulary they’re introduced to because of the phonics background.
Learning how to pronounce perfectly isn’t so bad. With continued study they can study vocab meaning. It’s only a problem if they stop studying at this level.
Teacher teaches phonics.
Kids learn phonics.
….
God bless him for caring. If someone only gave me 5 minutes twice a week, we’d sing some songs from Coco Melon and I’d correct their pronunciation tangentially, if time allowed.
Enunciation is the better net win in this situation. It’s much harder to get a HATSUON JOUZU DA NE from learning through their Japanese teachers, so you’re rounding them off in a way that they cannot. Let someone else supplement their vocabulary
As a bonus take home exercise for students, he can create a flash cards system for the school that gets suggested to the head sensei, is appreciated, but is ultimately ignored
Isn’t being able to read more than you can understand the norm? Even as an adult I come across words I can read but don’t know the meaning of. That’s how you build vocabulary independently, isn’t it?
If they can now read well, it’s a good time to focus on that, even starting with very, very simple books. They’re quite old students, so to me, reading in English and then translating to Japanese something like an Oxford reading tree book would be a good way to get them using their reading skills and also acquiring new vocabulary.
Omg I’ve wanted to start something similar to this! I just didn’t know where I could find easy online books! There’s such a huge gap in the education system with lack of phonetics and readings. Tbh it feels like the schools are going through the motions rather than actually wanting to teach English.
I started phonics at the beginning of class as well and did mini lessons like quizzes if a word starts with R or L, but this time has gradually turned into playing abc games which tbh is really fun and often the highlight of the lesson for everyone so no stopping that.
When I did teach actual phonics the kids were like oooohhh naruhodo bc it helps connect dots of info they already have in their mind. But at this point I think I’ll just make a small curriculum for the 6ths graders to do at the end of the year as we often finish the textbook early. I would love to go into things like cvc patterns but without repetition and reading practice they will just forget it, and it’s hard too, as most teachers don’t even know it. My job is an English teacher, but I want to truly really teach someone English well which I feel like is impossible in public school system.
This is just a problem of learning a L2. Most native speakers can speak their native language fluently before they start reading. (It might be a four or five-year-old version of fluent, but I guarantee that is fluent.) So when a native speaker sounds out “c-a-t-” they eventually realize they’re saying “cat” and are satisfied they have read the word and know the meaning. If that same native speaker sounded out “catatonic” they probably would be just as confused as the Japanese kids. The main difference is that a native speaker not only has a larger vocabulary, they intuitively understand the grammar, too. A native English speaker will sound out “The cat is on the mat” and be satisfied with that sentence. A Japanese child who doesn’t know grammar (or not well) and certainly doesn’t know particles like “the” will maybe understand “cat” and maybe “on” if you’ve done that. And even if they know all of those vocabulary words, might still struggle to understand due to the different word order for English vs. Japanese.
I agree that katakana is a horrible system for teaching proper pronunciation to Japanese students, but it is also really helpful, too. And with five minutes to teach, anything is possible.
I’d just recommend only giving them materials they know the vocab for. Or, as others have said, focus on singing and games, and maybe just focus on speaking correctly vs. reading correctly. (Getting students to drop the “o” when saying ‘cat’ / カット took me a month of once a week, hour-long classes alone.)