How to teach Japanese kids to read English: Know your phonics and you'll never be short of students
The Bulletin (Issue 27)
You know how to read, you learnt it as a child, right? How hard can it be to teach Japanese kids to read? Ahhh. Not as easy as it sounds, is it? Just because many can identify and even write all of the letters, and most know the ABC song, it doesn’t seem to help Japanese kids read English. At all.
What is the trick to getting them to read? If you could only nail it, your value as an English teacher would triple. Well, let me make an honest promise to you: By the end of this post, you’ll know everything and have all the links and materials you need to succeed as a kids’ English reading coach — but you have to work at it.
Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin…
It is all about how it sounds
Being able to say the letter names “A,B, C…” is of little help. These are the names of the letters, not the sounds they make. For example, “S” (“ess”) sounds like… (make the hiss of a snake) “sssssss”. That’s the phonetic sound, and there are 42 sounds in English. They are not always represented by single letters (consider the sounds that “ch” or “sh” make) and sometimes the same letter is pronounced differently (eg the c in “cut” and the c in “cent”) and consider the a in “ant” and the a in “cake”. But let’s not get lost in the details just yet. If you teach the kids the most common sounds that the letters and letter combinations make first, you can teach the exceptions later (kids don’t need to learn that k is silent in “knight” or gh can sound like an f, or nothing at all — until they’ve got a grasp of the general principles).
Your job, sorry sensei this requires a bit of homework on your part, is to learn the 42 sounds of English and their most common spellings off by heart. Learn the actions (or make them up yourself if that suits you) at the same time — wave your hand like a snake when pronouncing “sssss”, mime you’re a dog holding a rope in your teeth when you pronounce “rrrrrrrrr”. But where can you get a definitive list of the 42 sounds and examples of what they sound like… and the actions?
Right here. It’s a 14-minute video I made during corona for my students and their parents to practise at home. And you can see H-chan, a first year elementary school student in our school, demonstrate the sounds and actions here of the 26 letters of the alphabet. See? If little Japanese kids can master this, what’s stopping you?
Granted, there is a lot to get your head around (especially for the kids), so I published a phonics workbook that has everything the kid (and teacher) needs to get up to speed, arranged in a syllabus of increasing complexity. We use this with our third year kindergarteners and any new elementary students joining from other language schools who, typically, haven’t been taught to read. There are other phonics books and courses out there, but we couldn’t find any that included everything the Japanese student and teacher needed in one place, arranged in a logical order, so we published one ourselves, and I’m sure you could use the same workbook to get your students reading.
Other ways you can get kids up to speed is write the letters signifying the 42 sounds on cards, bottle tops or wooden blocks and practise with the kids until they can identify the right sounds with a high level of accuracy, then start “blending” them together to sound out (at first) easy three- and four-letter words. Increase the complexity and start to introduce the (many) exceptions and “magic e” - the silent e makes the vowel say its own name, and so on.
Then you are ready to introduce graded readers (such as the Oxford University Press’s Biff, Chip and Kipper books, which I use). And before you know it… your students are actually reading.
A few tips that you may find helpful in getting kids to read:
The best ages, I find, for introducing phonetic reading is the third year of kindergarten and first year of elementary school, so ages 5 and 6. The kids are old enough to grasp the concepts but young enough not to feel self-conscious making the sounds and gestures (which help youngsters remember the sounds).
Focus on using lower case (as most words are written in lower case — just look at this sentence for example, only one capital and 100 lower case letters).
Don’t worry about punctuation marks. The kids have enough to get their heads round to worry about commas and apostrophes. That can come once they are reading fluently, say about elementary years 4 or 5.
Don’t worry overly about the children understanding the meanings of words, just getting the children to be able to pronounce the letter combinations correctly is a massive step. Meaning can come later.
Allow them to struggle a little. You want the kids reading on their own, right? Don’t spoon feed them the correct sounds all the time. Pause to allow them to try to remember the right sounds first.
Do a little phonics work frequently (like 5-10 minutes every lesson), rather than doing a lot infrequently (like a whole 40-minute lesson devoted to phonics once a month).
Praise frequently, and understand that some kids will get this in a matter of weeks, others take a couple of years.
Get this right, and your future as a self-employed English teacher in Japan is assured. Consider the priceless marketing value of a mum telling her friends “My 8-year-old son can read English books. He learnt it from a little eikaiwa I know.”
And when the Momma-tachi see little Taro actually reading… then it’s time to raise your fees.
Good luck!
Patrick
PS: if you are interested in the phonics workbook I published, the details are here:
84 pages of practice worksheets to learn all you need to know about phonics for students of English as a second language learning to read for the first time
For home and classroom use
42 lessons ideal for one year of weekly study, or as an intensive course
Features practice in recognising letter sounds, sounds of double letters, difficult to spell words for all the 42 phonetic sounds of English
Quirky child-friendly artwork
A checksheet/sticker page for children to keep track of their progress
This complete course created by two practicing English teachers in Japan will have young students reading by the end of the book!
...ahh, phonics: where 'ghoti' is pronounced /fɪʃ/.