There must be a better way of teaching English in Japan - say I after 10 years. I have worked through all the approaches -CLT, task-based etc.etc. bought each promising textbook as it came on the market. Did a Masters in my spare time.
Now I am enthused by a Sydney Uni. Prof. who insists on a top-down, whole text approach (heavy in scaffolding) as contrasted to our micro approach - bottom up analytical approach as exhibited by most of the postings on this web-site.
Surely there must be a better way than phonics - o.k. for English kids to learn writing but for Japanese???
Does this ring a bell for anybody out there?
geordie
Whole texts anybody?
Moderators: Dimitris, maneki neko2, Lorikeet, Enrico Palazzo, superpeach, cecil2, Mr. Kalgukshi2
-
Sally Olsen
- Posts: 1322
- Joined: Thu Apr 08, 2004 2:24 pm
- Location: Canada,France, Brazil, Japan, Mongolia, Greenland, Canada, Mongolia, Ethiopia next
I saw a video of teachers in the outback in Australia using the whole text approach with a group of beginning Aboriginal students. The teachers took a very exciting story with lots of pictures and told the story over and over to the students. They played games with the words and sentences pointing out which were the participants and which were the actions. The children acted out the actions and matched the name of the participants to pictures. The children were interested and engaged. They seemed to be picking up English whereas their history with learning English in previous years had been dismal according to the presenters of the video. I wonder how that has gone as this was in 2000.
Whole approach?
Iolwhites
Prettty obvious one-liner - can't you add a little more!
geordie
Prettty obvious one-liner - can't you add a little more!
geordie
Whole texts.
Sally,
Wonderful to hear from you again.
I haven't seen that 2000 DVD video but undoubtedly it is from the same prof.at the Sydney School. My recent video DVD shows mothers reading to their aboriginal children. The simple stories have to be especially interesting and appealing and they are read again and again. Then we have detailed reading sentence by sentence, word by word. This is scaffolding but much more elaborate. Their progress is quite moving.
I do not teach children here in Japan - only adults - but last week I asked a young mother to bring her 7 year old daughter to class together with her favourite English story book. The young girl had been studying for three years with a native English teacher - in a group- and her level was depressingly low. It appeared she had been working through different levels of ABC books. I spent 90 minutes with her using the above-mentioned approach. Her mother was pleasantly surprised at her progress during this short time.
Incidentally for the past two years I have been toiling with simple SFL techniques with my students - Participants, Processes and Circumstances.
Not too much as to frighten away my private students but hopefully to whet their appetites. I do think give the approach has given helpful insights to my students.
John Curran
Wonderful to hear from you again.
I haven't seen that 2000 DVD video but undoubtedly it is from the same prof.at the Sydney School. My recent video DVD shows mothers reading to their aboriginal children. The simple stories have to be especially interesting and appealing and they are read again and again. Then we have detailed reading sentence by sentence, word by word. This is scaffolding but much more elaborate. Their progress is quite moving.
I do not teach children here in Japan - only adults - but last week I asked a young mother to bring her 7 year old daughter to class together with her favourite English story book. The young girl had been studying for three years with a native English teacher - in a group- and her level was depressingly low. It appeared she had been working through different levels of ABC books. I spent 90 minutes with her using the above-mentioned approach. Her mother was pleasantly surprised at her progress during this short time.
Incidentally for the past two years I have been toiling with simple SFL techniques with my students - Participants, Processes and Circumstances.
Not too much as to frighten away my private students but hopefully to whet their appetites. I do think give the approach has given helpful insights to my students.
John Curran
-
Sally Olsen
- Posts: 1322
- Joined: Thu Apr 08, 2004 2:24 pm
- Location: Canada,France, Brazil, Japan, Mongolia, Greenland, Canada, Mongolia, Ethiopia next
I guess it would be hard to know with the 7 year old if your techniques using whole text were better or just presented at the right time after she has had three year of preparation with the alphabet and presumably phonics. I wonder if a better test would be to start with someone who had never heard English. I guess that is hard to do in Japan as most young children have had some exposure. Or continue with little 7 year old and after a certain period of time compare her in some way to her classmates in the group class. Wouldn't you have to have group classes as well though for a true comparison or one of her old class having private lessons?
Perhaps there is another question here of whether one way is right or one way is better? The way that you put the question would have prompted me to say the same as lolwhites, I'm afraid because I know that different students have different learning styles and some need bottom up and some need top down. The good students of any style will adapt their learning to compensate for what you don't teach them but the poor students will be stuck.
Perhaps there is another question here of whether one way is right or one way is better? The way that you put the question would have prompted me to say the same as lolwhites, I'm afraid because I know that different students have different learning styles and some need bottom up and some need top down. The good students of any style will adapt their learning to compensate for what you don't teach them but the poor students will be stuck.
When I learned to read, I seem to recall that there was a mixture of both approaches i.e. we learned about the letters but were read to as well. I was lucky enough to have parents who both read to me frequently, with me on their laps so I could try to follow the text as they read it.
It strikes me that the same can apply to language teaching/learning in general. So when I taught Spanish to beginners, I'd start with phrases, without going into too much detail about how they were constructed grammatically. But when the time came to look at how to conjugate, say -ER verbs in the present I was able to say "Now you can see why the waiter in the chapter on ordering drinks said Qué quiere and you had to say Quiero..."
It strikes me that the same can apply to language teaching/learning in general. So when I taught Spanish to beginners, I'd start with phrases, without going into too much detail about how they were constructed grammatically. But when the time came to look at how to conjugate, say -ER verbs in the present I was able to say "Now you can see why the waiter in the chapter on ordering drinks said Qué quiere and you had to say Quiero..."
Whole texts
Sally and Iolwhites,
I am not arguing for one way being better - but I am trolling through my online forums to find if there are any teachers - in TEFL - who are using this approach. (In Australia apparently it is being introduced in TESL).
I am not arguing for one way being better - but I am trolling through my online forums to find if there are any teachers - in TEFL - who are using this approach. (In Australia apparently it is being introduced in TESL).
whole texts
The following was written by Professor David Rose of Sydney University.
I think it sums up really well his SFL approach:
"In our functional model, language is a resource for meaning - a
multidimensional stratified system. In simple terms a text only makes
sense in relation to the cultural context that it realises. Each
sentence only makes sense within a meaningful text. Each word group/
phrase makes sense within these meaningful sentences. Each word makes
sense within these word groups, and the spelling and sound patterns of
words are only sensible in the context of these meaningful words.
Bit like a Russian doll - a matroshka!"
I think it sums up really well his SFL approach:
"In our functional model, language is a resource for meaning - a
multidimensional stratified system. In simple terms a text only makes
sense in relation to the cultural context that it realises. Each
sentence only makes sense within a meaningful text. Each word group/
phrase makes sense within these meaningful sentences. Each word makes
sense within these word groups, and the spelling and sound patterns of
words are only sensible in the context of these meaningful words.
Bit like a Russian doll - a matroshka!"
-
fluffyhamster
- Posts: 3031
- Joined: Tue Oct 26, 2004 6:57 pm
- Location: UK > China > Japan > UK again
Well, even if you have extended texts that are covering a lot of bases in a relatively clear fashion, there will surely be times when some student(s) question or ponder whether the linguistic choices on display are system(at)ic as they are being led to believe, and this is where the microanalysis would surely come in (or at least an examination of a representative sampling of concordance lines). (The systematicity that a learner eventually productively achieves is however ultimately more down to personal choice than slavish imitation of examples, and this really is where "alternatives" will probably need to be tried out at least initially by the student).
Are actual terms from SFL that necessary - aren't simple question words e.g. Who? What? Where? WTF? LOL etc sufficient in themselves, as prompts?
Just thought I'd share some thoughts on phonics in Japan (yes, I believe that phonics should be taught). I've taught elementary and junior high school kids in private language schools and the public school systems. They appear to start looking at the alphabet in elementary 4th grade, and studying it formally from the first year of junior high. The only thing is, phonics often doesn't actually get mentioned, it's all just the ABC song (naming the letters, useful for spelling but not for actual reading) and penmanship (learning stroke orders of capital and lower case by heart)...all of which takes years, with many kids at 16 still lacking even a sight vocabulary let alone much phonic decoding ability with unfamiliar words (or is this just the legendary Japanese hesitancy and fear of making mistakes).
So I came up and refined a quick method to familarize students with how the alphabet works, relating new (the alphabet) to known (the Gojuon, fifty sounds of Japanese - a i u e o, ka ki ku ke ko etc). I briefly mention the ABC song and spelling, but soon move on to relating lower case letters to not only kana shapes but also sounds, thus:
a: there is an 'a' visible in the lower left hand part of the hiragana symbol "a" (Hepburn romanization).
i: long downstroke with shorter stroke near top is similar visually and phonically in both languages.
u: rotate the hiragana symbol almost 180 degress clockwise and then reverse the stroke order and you have 'u'.
e: superimpose the western symbol on/inside the hiragana one.
o: western is like the end stroke or the hiragana.
The above only covers short vowel sounds in short words and is a bit "Italiany", but with the addition of "magic e" for longer vowel sounds etc it covers the majority of the values that vowels have in elementary wordlists. It's certainly quick and better than nothing.
For the consonants, again following the Gojuon, under hiragana 'ku' I place the letters c, k and q (c looks like ku, and k and q are similar sounds just with the addition of an extra stroke to the left then right respectively); with the addition of two nigori dots to katakana ku we have something that looks like the letter g, if we move those nigori down and to left fill the gap in the gu). I also mention that c can have an s value (again is it like the addition of an extra stroke/tail to the c, although this could be confusing).
j reminds me of katakana ji (shi with nigori); z of katakana zu (su with nigori); t of hiragana ta (delete the third stroke, and add a looping tail to the right of the second, or superimpose the western symbol on the Japanese); d of hiragana do (to with nigori, move the nigori to fill the gap in the kana symbol); f of hirgana fu; b of katakana bu (fu with nigori, again move them to make the b downstroke); p of katakana pu (think "circular" at top of fu, it is after all fu with a mini circle rather than stroke nigori); h of he in either kana syllabary; m of katakana ma rotated 90 degrees anti-clockwise and with an extra stroke added; y of katakana ya rotated 90 degress cloclwise and with the stroke order reversed; r of hiragana ra; l of katakana re; w of hiragana wa rotated almost 180 degrees clockwise and the stroke order reversed; and finally n of hiragana/syllabic n.
There are two letters that I don't relate to the Gojuon, s and x: like a snake and X-Men LOL.
I'd be interested to know if people who decide to try this encounter the same success that I did (i.e. having the more attentive students showing appreciation and understainding within minutes of the 15 minute or so presentation, and carefully putting away the charts for safekeeping and future reference).
Are actual terms from SFL that necessary - aren't simple question words e.g. Who? What? Where? WTF? LOL etc sufficient in themselves, as prompts?
Just thought I'd share some thoughts on phonics in Japan (yes, I believe that phonics should be taught). I've taught elementary and junior high school kids in private language schools and the public school systems. They appear to start looking at the alphabet in elementary 4th grade, and studying it formally from the first year of junior high. The only thing is, phonics often doesn't actually get mentioned, it's all just the ABC song (naming the letters, useful for spelling but not for actual reading) and penmanship (learning stroke orders of capital and lower case by heart)...all of which takes years, with many kids at 16 still lacking even a sight vocabulary let alone much phonic decoding ability with unfamiliar words (or is this just the legendary Japanese hesitancy and fear of making mistakes).
So I came up and refined a quick method to familarize students with how the alphabet works, relating new (the alphabet) to known (the Gojuon, fifty sounds of Japanese - a i u e o, ka ki ku ke ko etc). I briefly mention the ABC song and spelling, but soon move on to relating lower case letters to not only kana shapes but also sounds, thus:
a: there is an 'a' visible in the lower left hand part of the hiragana symbol "a" (Hepburn romanization).
i: long downstroke with shorter stroke near top is similar visually and phonically in both languages.
u: rotate the hiragana symbol almost 180 degress clockwise and then reverse the stroke order and you have 'u'.
e: superimpose the western symbol on/inside the hiragana one.
o: western is like the end stroke or the hiragana.
The above only covers short vowel sounds in short words and is a bit "Italiany", but with the addition of "magic e" for longer vowel sounds etc it covers the majority of the values that vowels have in elementary wordlists. It's certainly quick and better than nothing.
For the consonants, again following the Gojuon, under hiragana 'ku' I place the letters c, k and q (c looks like ku, and k and q are similar sounds just with the addition of an extra stroke to the left then right respectively); with the addition of two nigori dots to katakana ku we have something that looks like the letter g, if we move those nigori down and to left fill the gap in the gu). I also mention that c can have an s value (again is it like the addition of an extra stroke/tail to the c, although this could be confusing).
j reminds me of katakana ji (shi with nigori); z of katakana zu (su with nigori); t of hiragana ta (delete the third stroke, and add a looping tail to the right of the second, or superimpose the western symbol on the Japanese); d of hiragana do (to with nigori, move the nigori to fill the gap in the kana symbol); f of hirgana fu; b of katakana bu (fu with nigori, again move them to make the b downstroke); p of katakana pu (think "circular" at top of fu, it is after all fu with a mini circle rather than stroke nigori); h of he in either kana syllabary; m of katakana ma rotated 90 degrees anti-clockwise and with an extra stroke added; y of katakana ya rotated 90 degress cloclwise and with the stroke order reversed; r of hiragana ra; l of katakana re; w of hiragana wa rotated almost 180 degrees clockwise and the stroke order reversed; and finally n of hiragana/syllabic n.
There are two letters that I don't relate to the Gojuon, s and x: like a snake and X-Men LOL.
I'd be interested to know if people who decide to try this encounter the same success that I did (i.e. having the more attentive students showing appreciation and understainding within minutes of the 15 minute or so presentation, and carefully putting away the charts for safekeeping and future reference).
-
Sally Olsen
- Posts: 1322
- Joined: Thu Apr 08, 2004 2:24 pm
- Location: Canada,France, Brazil, Japan, Mongolia, Greenland, Canada, Mongolia, Ethiopia next
My Japanese is not up to understanding all of what you are doing, Fluffy, but it certainly shows that bilingual teachers have an advantage in teaching students. I was wondering if we could cross post this to the discussion that we had on teaching the alphabet as well?
When I read this sentence in your post:
The systematicity that a learner eventually productively achieves is however ultimately more down to personal choice than slavish imitation of examples, and this really is where "alternatives" will probably need to be tried out at least initially by the student.
it struck me that this might be is exactly what Geordie is trying to say. We all try to make meaning and we chose words and the arrangement of words that are meaningful for us. I think that regulars on this forum could pick out this sentence from a group as being penned by Fluffy. Something short and penetrating would probably be from metal and so on.
Textbooks, on the other hand, are usually written by a committee or at least many people get input. That gives textbooks a special meaning because they are written from a certain standpoint, often political and always cultural. For example, my friend examined board books for children in Canada from 50 years ago and today. (Board books are printed on heavy cardboard so little ones can't rip the pages, can drool over them and not damage them and so on.). She found that the 50 year old books was much more overtly political, filled with "manners" of the day, more formal in teaching the moral and the main character was more adult than child-like. There was no mistaking the language used then and today.
I know when you use the words "whole text" Geordie you don't mean "texts" like we get in school "textbooks" but they are a major part of what we do use in schools and students need to understand them as well.
When I read this sentence in your post:
The systematicity that a learner eventually productively achieves is however ultimately more down to personal choice than slavish imitation of examples, and this really is where "alternatives" will probably need to be tried out at least initially by the student.
it struck me that this might be is exactly what Geordie is trying to say. We all try to make meaning and we chose words and the arrangement of words that are meaningful for us. I think that regulars on this forum could pick out this sentence from a group as being penned by Fluffy. Something short and penetrating would probably be from metal and so on.
Textbooks, on the other hand, are usually written by a committee or at least many people get input. That gives textbooks a special meaning because they are written from a certain standpoint, often political and always cultural. For example, my friend examined board books for children in Canada from 50 years ago and today. (Board books are printed on heavy cardboard so little ones can't rip the pages, can drool over them and not damage them and so on.). She found that the 50 year old books was much more overtly political, filled with "manners" of the day, more formal in teaching the moral and the main character was more adult than child-like. There was no mistaking the language used then and today.
I know when you use the words "whole text" Geordie you don't mean "texts" like we get in school "textbooks" but they are a major part of what we do use in schools and students need to understand them as well.
-
fluffyhamster
- Posts: 3031
- Joined: Tue Oct 26, 2004 6:57 pm
- Location: UK > China > Japan > UK again
You don't really need to be that advanced in Japanese, Sally - rather, just have access to a decent chart of the fifty sounds and kana symbols of Japanese. The following link doesn't show them all at once, but at least it should display them on non-Japanese PCs:
http://www.kanachart.com/
I've also posted a summary on the Japan forum of my above post:
http://forums.eslcafe.com/job/viewtopic ... 405#602405
Interested readers might like to refer between that summary and the kana on kanachart to better appreciate the visual and to some extent phonic similarities that I'm driving at.
I'll comment more on your comments and the thread in general when I've got a bit more time.
http://www.kanachart.com/
I've also posted a summary on the Japan forum of my above post:
http://forums.eslcafe.com/job/viewtopic ... 405#602405
Interested readers might like to refer between that summary and the kana on kanachart to better appreciate the visual and to some extent phonic similarities that I'm driving at.
I'll comment more on your comments and the thread in general when I've got a bit more time.
For those interested, this issue's been discussed here:
http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewt ... highlight=
In the U.S., the whole-text only approach has been tried many decades, and the resultant criticism on a massive scale has ushered in a balanced approach of phonics and whole text; and the previous reading wars have abated. (This doesn't make much sense to me: even if you teach phonics, kids autmatically and naturally switch over to whole text as they become more mature in their reading. But forget common sense; as long as everyone feels included politically.)
The problem with whole-text only is that more kids get left behind (because they just don't get it) than in a phonics classroom. Kids are smart and they can figure out and memorize codes without it being specified to them. But many of them apparently don't. Phonics ensures reading comprehension for the maximal number of students.
I remember substituting for a first-grade assistant teacher a couple of consecutive days in 1994 and seeing the whole-text approach employed in the classroom -- one story was read repeatedly two or three times a day, the same story. One child was having difficulty reading and was generally distracted (as well as distractive). I was asked to help him individually. He was struggling to read the words as he was relying on his failed memory of what the whole words were. I proceeded to teach him how to sound out words -- a concept that was clearly unfamiliar to him. After he saw a rhyme and reason to the alphabet and reading in general, (instead of being easily distracted as before) he began to get engrossed in the book with his new-found acquired reading skills. Within twenty minutes, I managed to get him to the point that he could make out a few previously unknown words (unknown in written form -- he already knew the words in spoken form) exclusively by sounding them out. That one student alone powerfully symbolized for me the importance of an approach that included all types of children and therefore the justness of phonics.
http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewt ... highlight=
In the U.S., the whole-text only approach has been tried many decades, and the resultant criticism on a massive scale has ushered in a balanced approach of phonics and whole text; and the previous reading wars have abated. (This doesn't make much sense to me: even if you teach phonics, kids autmatically and naturally switch over to whole text as they become more mature in their reading. But forget common sense; as long as everyone feels included politically.)
The problem with whole-text only is that more kids get left behind (because they just don't get it) than in a phonics classroom. Kids are smart and they can figure out and memorize codes without it being specified to them. But many of them apparently don't. Phonics ensures reading comprehension for the maximal number of students.
I remember substituting for a first-grade assistant teacher a couple of consecutive days in 1994 and seeing the whole-text approach employed in the classroom -- one story was read repeatedly two or three times a day, the same story. One child was having difficulty reading and was generally distracted (as well as distractive). I was asked to help him individually. He was struggling to read the words as he was relying on his failed memory of what the whole words were. I proceeded to teach him how to sound out words -- a concept that was clearly unfamiliar to him. After he saw a rhyme and reason to the alphabet and reading in general, (instead of being easily distracted as before) he began to get engrossed in the book with his new-found acquired reading skills. Within twenty minutes, I managed to get him to the point that he could make out a few previously unknown words (unknown in written form -- he already knew the words in spoken form) exclusively by sounding them out. That one student alone powerfully symbolized for me the importance of an approach that included all types of children and therefore the justness of phonics.
whole text approach
I skimmed through the previous very impressive discussion on phonics etc.
I am not trying to open this discussion again.
I am asking if there is anybody interested, or trying to introduce the method developed by Prof. Rose of Sydney University - the super scaffolding approach he is developing successfully with the Aboriginal children.
I am not trying to open this discussion again.
I am asking if there is anybody interested, or trying to introduce the method developed by Prof. Rose of Sydney University - the super scaffolding approach he is developing successfully with the Aboriginal children.