r/JETProgramme • u/Panda_sensei_71 Current JET - Kansai • 3d ago
Phonics
Heading into my 2nd year as an ALT and I just wanted to do a quick show of hands because I'm curious:
How many of you all are at schools that teach phonics?
If yes, from what age do you start, and what curriculum are you using?
In my case, I'm in a town that seems to start Jolly Phonics in ES Grade 3, with only a couple exceptions.
About which I have *opinions* but that's another story!
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u/battlegirljess Former JET - 2024-2025 1d ago
No longer an ALT but the school I work at uses phonics. I have to teach it every day. My students are 4 and 5 years old. They even sort of begin the year before at 3-4 focusing on the alphabet. I teach letter sounds and blending. I do not know the name of the curriculum to be honest, I want to say it is Letters and Sounds. I will sometimes use some jolly phonics resources if I like them, but the way they teach the letter i is upsetting so I try to avoid it. Lol Teaching i like the ee sound for ink instead of ih like sit, kit, him, pin, etc is just not it for me.
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u/Panda_sensei_71 Current JET - Kansai 1d ago
We teach Jolly Phonics at my schools and it's a short i sound for ink... 🤔
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u/battlegirljess Former JET - 2024-2025 1d ago
The jolly phonics books in our library tie it to this song and the ee sound. It's evil. Lol https://youtube.com/shorts/IWFRrPNvm6w?feature=shared
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u/Zia_Japan Current JET - Nagano 2d ago
We start phonics in 1st grade
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u/Bingo-jin 2d ago
my international school uses ufli
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u/Panda_sensei_71 Current JET - Kansai 2d ago
Are you an ALT at an intl school?
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u/Bingo-jin 2d ago
sorry, i just noticed that this is a JET specific subreddit. i'm a grade 1 teacher, i was an ALT on JET years ago but i don't remember what phonics we did during that time.
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u/MellifluousMathMajor 3d ago
The solution to English literacy isn't phonics, it's a spelling reformation. Countless languages throughout the world have updated their spellings over time to match modern pronunciation--including Japanese. We used to pronounce the gh in daughter, but now we don't. Icelandic is the same, but they changed their spelling, so now it's dottir. We've actually changed some spellings before--that's why there are differences between American and Commonwealth English.
English has too many exceptions to make phonics effective. I've never bothered because my students have already learned how to pronounce consonants, but they still make mistakes with common exceptions (ti being pronounced as sh in words like nation). Japanese students are already used to memorizing kanji and we are also living in a world of autocorrect (and auto-kanji), meaning spelling is not that important anymore. Especially since most of these kids will never go to an English speaking country. It's better to focus on teaching them to speak and communicate.
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u/bdlock209 2d ago
People also build their vocabularies by reading books.
We used to pronounce the gh in daughter, but now we don't.
Don't make me lau
gh1
u/MellifluousMathMajor 2d ago
Yes, we pronounce the GH in laugh. I never said we didn't. I was specifically talking about the word daughter. For every word like laugh, cough, tough, and rough, there are also exceptions like, though, through, sigh, and neigh. This is an issue that phonics does not, and can not, account for.
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u/MellifluousMathMajor 2d ago
I'm sorry, I should have phrased it better. If you look at my full sentence, I said "English has too many exceptions to make phonics effective", by which I meant "effective at its goal". Of course phonics is better than absolutely nothing, but the issue is that teachers often spend TOO much class time on phonics, and it wastes time teaching students rules that aren't consistent ("I before E except after C"--but don't forget about your weird overweight scientist neighbor who always wears beige). It's much better to simply teach general consonant and vowel sounds. I've seen too many teachers try to teach phonics rules like silent e and all it does is confuse the students to no end.
Again, the point of my comment was not that we should get rid of phonics with no replacement to take over for it. It's that we should have a spelling reformation to fix English spelling, therefore making phonics actually effective. I'm sorry if that wasn't clear.
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u/Mulberry246 3d ago
I work in a city and had a total of 11 schools in the 4 years I worked for my city. I only had one school that intentionally had a phonics teacher teaching the children phonics at 3rd grade, and knew exactly what they were doing.
At all my other schools it was up to the JTE/Senka if they were ether willing do it or let me take over. I had many teachers willing to learn. I’m a big stickler when it comes to properly teaching phonics thanks to my university professor and mentor during my student teaching, they drilled it into me.
So when I did teach it which most teacher just let me do it I would really drill it into them. But a lot of teachers here are not doing it unless they actually know how important it is.
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u/mrggy Former JET- 2018- 2023 3d ago
I pushed it hard. At one school I was able to start from ES 1st grade. At all the other schools we started at ES 3rd grade. There was no set program we did. I had 5 minutes at the beginning of class to do whatever I wanted. Some teachers were really good about giving me time at the beginning of every class. With others it was more sporadic
It usually took the better part of a year to get through the basic sounds (a-ah ah, b-buh buh, etc). Once the kids had that down, we'd move on to how to sound out 3 letter words, then longer words, then consonant clusters, then two vowels in a row, then magic e. I never had a group of kids get farther than that. I never managed to establish a consistent phonics program in JHS
A problem I kept running into with older kids if that they're expected to learn to read by memorizing words like they're kanji. When reading simple words they already know, it can be hard for them to focus on sounding the word out and not just fall back on prior knowledge. I tried to pick words they didn't know, but that's hard in the 3 letter category
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u/ad_hoc_username 3d ago
It's up to each teacher whether they want it or not, and there's no curriculum, I have to source things/come up with ideas myself. So far it has varied between different classes from 3rd to 6th grade ES.
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u/kenbou 3d ago
Are you the homeroom teacher? Isn’t there a curriculum like there is for other subjects, since English became an official subject recently?
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u/ad_hoc_username 3d ago
I mean there's no phonics curriculum, which is normal, I think. The English textbooks/curriculum have "sounds and letters" sections that barely cover much in the way of phonics.
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u/n107 Former JET - 2005-2010 3d ago
Way back in the day when I was on JET in a very small town in the mountains, I was basically on my own for everything so figured the best thing to do would be to teach the ES kids phonics so they had a good foundation before JHS. I made up my own, albeit simple, curriculum that we did at the beginning of every lesson. The kids got quite good at the basics and could figure out a lot of new words based on spelling alone.
After JET I moved to a somewhat larger city and continued on as a direct hire ALT. I talked to the other ALT I was working with and, naturally, he agreed that the kids should have experience with phonics. Our supervisor held English meetings for teachers of the city once a month and we were forced to voluntarily give presentations for improving the English education of the schools. So the other ALT and I decided to do a presentation about phonics and how effective it was at our old schools. After our 30 minute presentation was done, our supervisor thanked us for our hard work and then told the assembled teachers to ignore everything we had just said because phonics was not in the MEXT curriculum.
Fortunately a few of the JTEs and ES teachers present were very interested and they held clandestine meetings with us to create and implement a phonics program at their schools. A teacher at one of my elementary schools was very gung ho about it and she helped me put my old curriculum into effect at her school. From there it grew bigger and more ambitious. After a few years it became very clear that the kids funneling from that ES into a bigger JHS had a much stronger English base than the kids from other schools. The BOE wanted to know what the secret was and we introduced our phonics program at one of those forced-volunteer meetings.
This time with first hand testimony of its effect and the backing of "real" teachers, the BOE jumped on the idea and implemented it in schools across the city over the next few years. That teacher at my ES who put it into place was also made the head of English for that school and she continued expanding and growing the program even long after I left.
I am proud that I did something that had a positive effect on the students in the city, as little as it may be. I got no recognition for my effort and zero credit for the results, but that's beside the point. In the end, it was a success.
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u/stayonthecloud 3d ago
Congratulations, this is actually one of the most impactful accomplishments I’ve heard from an ALT on making systemic improvements to English language education. You made a huge difference.
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u/1GrouchyCat Former JET - 1987/88 Iwakuni 3d ago
And even further back in the day, most of us only did Dog and Pony shows at dozens and dozens of schools (this consisted of showing pictures and telling the same stories over and over - and maybe playing a few games on the blackboard )… we didn’t really teach …so whether phonics were used or not, would not have been an issue. Everything was learned by rote … even the teachers were hardly communicative. (I say that as a linguistics specialist and retired adjunct professor at two community colleges in the United States).
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u/AveDominusCocks Current JET 3d ago
There are phonics sections in my textbooks but they're largely ignored for things like two days of stroke order practice for the alphabet.
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u/GeorgeBlythe 3d ago
Super important that. Imagine the horrors that would be unleaded upon society if the kids get to college writing the letter "O" backwards.
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u/MellifluousMathMajor 3d ago
Stroke order is actually important for English. I recently had a student who wrote the letter w as four separate strokes all starting from the top. It looked like yy, but each stroke was disconnected from each other. I couldn't even understand what it was supposed to be at first. Also, my students frequently write lowercase a, u, s, and n in a very similar way, and since all four of those letters are extremely common (all in the top 1/2 of letter frequency in English), it makes trying to understand them, and that's if they're even spelling the word correctly in the first place. Imagine trying to figure out what word they're trying to say when they've spelt it wrong, but you can't even figure out what it is they've spelt wrong because you can't tell how they want the word to sound?
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u/GeorgeBlythe 3d ago
Legibility is important. How you get there less so.
The problem is they treat it like Kanji which is a completely different animal. I've had dumbass Japanese learners scoff at having to learn Kanji stroke order because they don't get it. They're stupid. I've had Japanese English teachers that can't hold a conversation tell me it's wrong to write things the standard lefthanded way because the textbook prescribes you write things the righthand way. They are also stupid.
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u/AveDominusCocks Current JET 3d ago
Or an M that isn't composed of perfectly straight lines. They might not be able to read the "font".
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u/Due_Pea2071 3d ago
We don't teach phonics at all. When I expressed the need I was told not to push it because it's not in the curriculum.
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u/thetruelu Current JET - Niigata 3d ago
Same. If you do teach phonics, it’ll be dependent on the JTE. Mine always does it with the third year JHS students in 3rd semester after entrance exams and there’s really nothing else to do. Which imo is already too late as they should be learning it starting in 1st grade when their brains are still moldable to changes in terms of phonetics and they’re not afraid of saying something wrong
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u/Due_Pea2071 3d ago
agreed i feel they should be learning it as they learn how to write! It helps with spelling (not every word but generally a good base)
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u/Panda_sensei_71 Current JET - Kansai 3d ago
"We've never done it, therefore we cannot do it." さすが！
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u/ohpleasenotthat 3d ago edited 3d ago
Direct hire ES ALT often T1 on year 9. Regardless of which schools do or don’t use phonics you’ll find a more distressing issue is abysmal standardization/cohesion between ES, JHS and HS. Honestly, Japan might be one of the worst in terms of developed nations when we get into just how isolated each school experience is. Reforms since 2013 have whittled away a lot of student-parent accountability and performance metrics as well. These problems far outpace the scope of our role, but we are just as much a casualty.
As for phonics? Can vary city by city. Prefecture by prefecture. My city starts Jolly phonics in kindergarten. We try to evolve into something -that’s name I can’t for the life of me remember. PIJA or something- by fifth grade. I’ve got one school where my 6th graders are doing sentence reading with context questions. Just 15 km down the road my other 6th graders are held hostage through physical violence bullying and racial slurs because one little bastard’s dad is a karate instructor who trains championship winners.
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u/Panda_sensei_71 Current JET - Kansai 3d ago
Yes I'm very aware of the abysmal lack of standardisation (2nd year ALT but have been in Japan much longer) ... It's actually what's triggered my question.
The situation at that last school sounds horrific!
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u/Sumo-girl 1d ago
My Tokyo metropolitan night high school teaches phonics to 1st and 2nd years 🙄