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gaijinalways
Joined: 29 Nov 2005
Posts: 2279
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 Posted: Fri Mar 14, 2008 5:26 pm Post subject: |
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Fluffy,
I don't see how your system is much better than teaching conventional pronunciation drills. Your system seems to involve a lot of reinforcement with what students already know, though we all know Katakana pronunciation doesn't match very well more typical English language pronunciation. |
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fluffyhamster
Joined: 13 Mar 2005
Posts: 3292
Location: UK > China > Japan > UK again
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| Posted: Fri Mar 14, 2008 10:50 pm Post subject: |
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| gaijinalways wrote: |
| I don't see how your system is much better than teaching conventional pronunciation drills. Your system seems to involve a lot of reinforcement with what students already know, though we all know Katakana pronunciation doesn't match very well more typical English language pronunciation. |
But how are kids going to (or how do they) remember and acquire lasting pronunciation of actual English words (as printed only in English) with things as they are in most elementary and junior high schools? In elementary school, they are lucky if they get to study even romaji in much depth (which obviously doesn't break the "alphabet" that appears within it up enough); then in high school, they learn penmanship/strokes of letters and the ABC song before rapidly falling back on katakana furigana (for e.g. preparation for "reading" (reading aloud, recitation) tests). It all seems to be a test of rote learning and memory than developing any robust phonological awareness or decoding/encoding skills, but please tell me if you've seen or had many classes that manage to cram in more than hit and miss spelling tests on top of "all that".
I just know that I would prefer that the kids stand a better chance of understanding sooner rather than later the written form of whatever words were being heard and then drilled (see my first sentence again), and I'd like to know how they could pick up a quicker mastery of at least the shapes of the letters in the words they were meeting, unless this happens pretty effortlessly in JHS, which I rather suspect it doesn't always - I feel that there are many kids who are trying to memorize words as "whole words" in an almost kanji-like way (not that kanji don't have any phonetic component), seemingly unaware of what an alphabetical system is really like.
But like I say, I admit that AETs or eikaiwa teachers with more time and freedom could well dispense with the "crash course" that I've outlined here, and its effectiveness or otherwise would in any case be hard to establish if a fuller phonics-based approach and the development of genuine reading skills did not follow it up and soon replace it - it is only meant as a temporary crutch/rough initial mnemonic aid (mainly to the shape rather than the sound of the letters, especially the vowels!), not an ongoing object of study in and of itself.
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| Quote: |
| I don't see how your system is much better than teaching conventional pronunciation drills. |
How do (or would) you teach "penmanship" (stroke orders of letters) at least? (You seem to be thinking only in terms of listening and speaking). Learning to write the letters correctly can take up quite a lot of time (semesters if not years) with rote methods that make no attempt to build on pre-existing knowledge.
| Quote: |
| Your system seems to involve a lot of reinforcement with what students already know |
That is the whole point - to relate new, presumably unknown to known; to build upon pre-existing knowledge; to launch into English letters on the basis of Japanese kana (and from there into English words, leaving the kana-letter "link" behind as soon as possible (which is indeed possible!)).
| Quote: |
| though we all know Katakana pronunciation doesn't match very well more typical English language pronunciation. |
That would seem to me an area for empirical investigation (there are some words at least where the match is actually quite close, if we stress that any final kana vowels must bow out to what actually appears in English words, especially their endings (where only consonants abound in the pronunciation if not also the spelling)); besides, the Japanese seem quite content to katakana-ize everything, and it often works out reasonably enough (not that I am defending this in the context of ELT, or that I am actually teaching kana, and certainly not "full" kana pronunciation for English words!). |
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