MYC08 Phonics (Kamakura)
Lecture
The Four Basic Perspectives of Evaluation
Where do we start? (Speaking)
Phonics is an activity that spans the four perspectives of evaluation outlined in MEXT's English Course of Study: Speaking, Listening, Reading, and Writing. That said, it is important to figure out which of these four perspectives of evaluation is the most basic. In other words, where do we start?
It is common to say that phonics is about English letters and the sounds those letters make. Two months ago, even I was saying this. Then I started researching phonics for this presentation. As I did research, I realized something very simple. The letters on the page don't make sounds, students do. The letters simply represent sounds.
As such, I want to argue that phonics starts with speaking. If students don't first learn to make the sounds, the English letters will have nothing to represent. If you don't start teaching phonics with speaking, the English alphabet becomes meaningless.
One of my co-workers didn't entirely agree with me. He agreed that reading and writing have to come after speaking and listening, but he figured that the only way students could learn to make a sound is by first listening to the sound and then copying that sound.
I did a little experiment with some of my students and found that no matter how many times I made a sound, my students would copy the sound incorrectly. Even more interesting, not only could my students not copy the sounds I made correctly, they couldn't distinguish between the sounds I was making. For example, the sound "r" sounded the same to my students as the sound "l".
It was only after I taught them how to use their mouths, lips and toungue to make the l sound and the r sound that my students started to gain the ability to hear those sounds.
This is why I believe that phonics starts with speaking and not listening.
What Next? (Listening and Reading)
I think that learning to listen to the sounds of the English language is the second step of phonics. If you teach students the sensation of making a sound, your students will gain the ability to hear that sound. If you teach your students the sensation of hearing the sound, you can label that sound with an image that represents it. For example, read the letter "a" and imagine the sensation of of making a sounds and, at the same time, imagine the sensation of hearing the sound. Suddenly, the letter "a" takes on a very concrete meaning.
And then? (Writing)
If you approach phonics using first through speaking, then through listening, and finally through reading, you will engage your students in three ways: you will engage them tactilely by making them aware of the muscles they need to use to make an English sound; secondly, you will engage them aurally by developing their ability to distinguish English sounds when they hear them; thirdly, you will engage them visually by helping showing them symbols that represent the sounds they have learned to make and hear.
Couched in these concrete physical sensations, you can then teach penmanship. In penmanship, we face two problems, memory and muscle coordination. Memory problems usually occur because we skip over teaching students to make, hear and read letters before we teach them to write them. We are asking students to create mental output without first giving them any concrete physical sensations as input. If you take the time to teach phonics in the order I am outlining in this presentation, you can eliminate a lot of problems with memory when you teach penmanship. Problems with muscle coordination will probably continue and rote practice is the only way to overcome those problems.
Once students become skilled in penmanship; there will be two types of students. There will be students who studied phonics and their will be students who did not study phonics. The students who studied phonics through speaking, listening, and reading will be able to use the English letters creatively and they are likely to remember them for the rest of their lives. The students who did not study the letters in this way will be able to write all the English letters, but they will not be able to use them creatively, and its likely that they will begin to forget what they learned.
So, please! Spend the time to teach your students to make, hear and read English sounds before you teach them to write the English alphabet.
Applications for Elementary Schools
It is vital to start phonics education in elementary school. If students arrive in Junior High School already possessing the ability to make, hear, and read English sounds, they will be able to learn to write the English alphabet properly and the English alphabet will be meaningful to them.
As you teach phonics in elementary school, please remember that you should spend most of your time practicing making and hearing English sounds. Once you have taught the students to do these to things, they will rapidly be able to memorize the symbols representing those sounds (letters). If your students struggle to remember the symbols representing the sounds, that means you need to go back and work more on making and listening to the sounds. Introduce your students to reading the English alphabet only in such a manner that it doesn't overwhelm them.
Because most people would disagree with the order of instruction I have presented here, it might be better to call what you do in Elementary Schools "familiarizing students with the sounds of the English language." Unfortunately, phonics seems to have become a buzz word and elementary school teachers often will believe that they are not supposed to teach phonics because they think that you are supposed to teach phonics after penmanship instead of before it, and according to the powers that be, penmanship is supposed to be left until junior high school.
Two More Perspectives Of Evaluation
Combining
Once students have gained a meaningful knowledge of the English alphabet, a lot of people think that they are finished teaching phonics. In reality, meaningful knowledge of the English alphabet is the beginning of phonics not the end. Just as you teach your students to combine letters to form vocabulary, you also have to teach your students to combine sounds to form words.
If you don't teach students to combine the basic Enlgish phonics sounds, your students will rely on the phonics system they already know: furigana. If your students are saying "Raito" instead of "right" or lefuto instead of "left," its because you haven't taught them how to combine simple English sounds in order to make complex English sounds.
Both right and left are examples of monosyllabic words and it would be easy for me to neglect explaining a key step in the process of learning to combine sounds. The second simplest sound in the English language phonics system is the syllable. There is something about the human brain that is able to naturally remember sounds and combine those sounds into syllables. There is also something natural about our ability to remember syllables.
Because it is easy for our students to remember single syllables, it is easy for us to forget to make sure our students are aware of how they are combining simples English sounds into syllables. It is very important that we don't forget to do this.
Its as simple as having the ALT or JTE write letters on the board and then having the class combine those letters until you create a word they have already practiced. If you teach the students how to do this, then students will have an easier time combining syllables to form mutli-syllabic words. If you don't do this, your students will have a great time learning mono-syllabic words and they will suddenly become lost at the end of their first year of junior high school when the number of multi-syllabic words they have to memorize jumps.
If you take the time to teach your to combine letters into mono-syllabic words, it will be possible for you to teach them to combine syllables into multi-syllabic words. If you don't take that time, many of your your students won't be able to memorize multi-syllabic words.
Its fairly easy for your students to combine letters into syllables. Its a little bit more difficult for your students to combine syllables into words. And it is more difficult for you to teach your students to combine words into sentences.
Regardless of whether you teach your students phonics at each step along the way, most of your students will probably be able to pass the high school entrance exam. The difference is that students who study phonics at each level along the way will be able to speak English, students who don't study phonics at each level along the way will not be able to speak English.
You can teach a student all the rules of English to perfection, but without phonics, your students will never be able to become fluent. They will be able to make words and they will be able to describe how to make sentences, but they won't be able to actually make sentences.
Parsing (Dividing)
If you don't teach phonics, your students will try to treat entire sentences like a single word. For example, let me use a famous example for elementary schools. When ALTs give self-introductions at elementary schools, there is usually at least one shocked little kid who, upon hearing "My name is Rob" incredulously repeats back to me, "Mayonaise Rob?"
That kid is usually the kid that turns out to be brilliant at phonics. S/he has a especially good aural memory. Other students can remember only a single syllable, but that student can remember the sounds of an entire sentence.
I think this brings up an interesting point. English speakers often like to think that there is a pause between each of our words. We think that spaces represent little silences. If you record yourself speaking at a natural pace, you will find this is not true. You speak in a constant stream of sound, pausing only for punctuation.
What spaces really represent is our ability to parse sounds into meaningful units. As native speakers, we can combine simple sounds into words that follow the English phonic system as well as break complex sounds down into simpler sounds that correspond to meaning. We need to develop these abilities in our students.
Just as you practiced combining letters into syllables, syllables into words, and words into sentences, it is important to practice parsing syllables into sounds, words into syllables, and sentences into words. To begin, its as simple as having the ALT say a short unfamiliar word and then having the JTE challenge the students to try to spell that word using their knowledge of simple English sounds.
Or take the example of the Mayonaise Elementary Student. If you teach him/her the meaning of each of the words, and the sounds that each of those words are composed of, then your student will be better prepared to learn the grammar rules behind the sentence "My name is..." once they arrive in Junior high school.
Conclusion
We need to teach our students the basics of phonics, moving from speaking, to listening, to reading, to writing, but we can't stop there. The basics of phonics give our students the tools they need learn to combine and parse (divide) sounds into meaningful units. Phonics isn't an extra refinement, it is the very basis of language. I don't have all of the activities necessary to teach phonics over the course of three years. Its up to us to develop them. Hopefully this presentation has helped you look at phonics in a new way so that you can create interesting activities to teach our students phonics as the basis of the English language.
In order to get you started, here are a few phonics activities I do have. (Wiki note: I had time to demonstrate some of these activities in my presentation, others are new. I hope you find them useful.)
P.S. Some simple English sounds are represented by more than one letter. For example, "th" or "ou" or "gh" or "ph". Despite the fact that these simple sounds are represented by two letters, these sounds are more like "a" and "b" and "k" than they are like "ra" or "be" or "so". Make sure that your students aren't frightened of these sounds just because they happen to be represented by two letters.
P.P.S. A lot of the strange vowel spellings in the English language come from the Great Vowel Shift that marked the end of Middle English and the beginning of Modern English.
Activities
Speaking
- Funny Face
- Pronunciation Tree
Listening
- Pronunciation Tree
- Phonics Karuta
Reading
- Penmanship & Phonics
- Janken Card Trading Game
