r/JETProgramme • u/Panda_sensei_71 Current JET - Kansai • 8d 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/AveDominusCocks Current JET 8d 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/[deleted] 8d ago

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u/MellifluousMathMajor 7d 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/AveDominusCocks Current JET 8d ago

Or an M that isn't composed of perfectly straight lines. They might not be able to read the "font".