Extensive Reading at School in Japan
Rob Waring
ER Seminar, Okayama, February 13, 2011
Today’s talk
Main focus
English in schools in Japan
MEXT’s recent pronouncements
What does MEXT mean?
The process of getting kids to read
Moving from words to stories
Individualized reading
Preparing for Junior High
Distribution of
Educational
Institutions Which
Have Introduced ER
2003
Takase and Furukawa 2009
Primary Schools
Secondary Schools
Colleges
& Adult Education
Distribution of
Educational
Institutions Which
Have Introduced ER
2008
Primary Schools
Secondary Schools
Colleges & Adults
Takase and Furukawa 2009
Short history of English education in Japan
English for
‘communication’
Focus on
‘Japaneseness’
Focus on
‘internationalization’
English as an
‘academic’ subject
Where are we today?
MEXT sets the central direction:
-English is a required course at Elementary school,
-but it’s not an academic subject
-no assessment
-low pressure
Movement of central control to local control
Fewer JETs; more city and prefecture hiring; more
innovative projects / trial programs
Unclear aims and lack of specifics
MEXT gives more freedom to see what works and what
doesn’t , and to see how teachers and citizens react to
the introduction of English at Elementary school
What is happening?
Over 90% of Elementary schools have English as part of
‘general subjects’
Private companies pushing hard at Elementary level
Growing differences within cities, prefectures when
students reach JHS
Growing diversification of English instruction
MEXT’s directives
No ‘teaching’
No writing
Focus on understanding
Receptive focus
No grammar
No assessment
Build positive image of English
Build motivation for English
ER
EL
The culture of the ‘one right answer’
The culture of the ‘one right answer’ helps build knowledge but doesn’t
help the process of learning because:
it tells kids to never be wrong and doesn’t allow them to be wrong
it denies them to chance to fail and learn from failure
it undervalues taking risks and resourcefulness
it creates cautious kids focused on memorizing details and who cannot
‘think on their feet’
it denies opportunities for kids to learn thorough experimenting with
ideas
it it educates them OUT of their creativity
it doesn’t foster co-operative learning and social integration
it does not prepare them for the future which will require flexibility,
resourcefulness, risk taking, clear thinking and creativity
Extensive reading and young learners
Recent research shows :
Young learners learn much faster if they have massive text input
(i.e. story reading)
There’s no advantage to starting English early if students don’t
have massive text support
Learners starting ER early end up with higher natural English ability
than students in intensive programs in High School
Early reading success leads to gains in self-efficacy / self
confidence (belief that success is due to what I do)
Early reading failure builds a sense of ‘learned helplessness’
(feelings of lack of control and disconnection)
What do the kids need?
They need to:
develop a sense of self-confidence and a ‘can do’
attitude
be able to manage risk-taking and not fear failure
develop creativity and imagination
develop a sense of ‘other awareness’
develop a sense of being in control of their
learning
What is Extensive Reading?
This is NOT EXTENSIVE
READING
This is LANGUAGE
STUDY READING
This is NOT EXTENSIVE
READING
This is LANGUAGE
STUDY READING
When reading extensively, students should READ
It is CRUCIAL that learners read at the RIGHT level
Read something quickly and
Enjoyably with
Adequate comprehension so they
Don’t need a dictionary
If they need a dictionary, it’s too hard and they will read slowly,
get tired and stop
Their aim is fluency and speed, not learning new language
We add the reading to our existing program, we don’t replace it.
Types of ER
There are several legitimate forms of ER
‘Pure ER’ – self-selected, own level, reading for
pleasure
‘Class Reading’ – all students read the same book
‘ER as literature’ – the class studies a book as a
piece
of literature
‘Integrated ER’ – ER supported by other activities
These don’t really apply at the beginning levels of
reading
Before students can do ER ….
They need
- to be able to recognize the letters and some letter
combinations (e.g. ch-, sp-, th-,)
- to be able to recognize how sounds become
written words
- to know a few hundred words
- to know a little bit of grammar (e.g. verb
inflections)
Principles to follow for early reading
instruction
Listening before reading
Sounds -> words
Sound out words - don’t spell them
Build a sight vocabulary
‘Scaffold’ the learning (build on previous knowledge)
Stages to get to individualized reading
Start with word building exercises through pictures and
sound (vocabulary building)
Phonics exercises to match sounds to words
Listening to stories to build a context for the vocabulary
(auditory contextualizing)
Reading easy materials (textual contextualizing)
Teach the alphabet only when they need to know how
to spell words
The typical Japanese child
Knows thousands of Japanese words and the Japanese
alphabet by age 6-7
May know a few dozen kanji
Has a rich understanding of ‘story’
Already has heard hundreds of stories which can be
built upon or retold in English
Has mastered many basic concepts
So how can we leverage this to get them reading?
Stage 1: Word / phrase learning
Concrete words
apple, table, horse, cat, teacher, board, paper,
Concrete verbs
write, do, make, play, see, look, walk, have,
Fixed and semi-fixed phrases (no need to analyze them)
good morning, happy birthday, how are you?
These can all be learnt through flash cards, or physical
actions, games etc.
What does a Japanese learner bring to their first
English class?
A few dozen loanwords:
hello, bye, ball, no, milk, pen, bed, hair, hand, school,
TV, radio, CD, white, night, black, dress, first, floor,
game, video, garden, head, heart, love, home, my,
morning, bus, boat, hotel, map, meter, shirt, pink,
beach, chicken, cheese, chocolate, burger, juice, lamp,
dollar, bike, belt, skirt, knife, fork, computer, orange,
mouse, bat, beef, menu, restaurant, golf, salad, tennis,
boyfriend, friend, girlfriend, banana, kilo, ham, lemon,
steak, cola, pizza, pasta, pants, tiger, tomato, lettuce,
mushroom, basketball, soccer, taxi, player, car, bag ….
What does a Japanese learner bring to their first
English class?
… glass, gorilla, note, book, curtain, screen, water, air
conditioner, headphones, photo, big, campaign, center,
captain, course, cup, cut, drive, energy, extra, fight, get,
go, green, half, hearing, hit, hot, idea, image, live, main,
medium, miss, mile, next, move, okay, off, choice, part,
play, race, rule, bargain, save, room, shop, shopping,
star, stop, station, thanks, time, test, top, wear, bell,
boss, bottle, cake, carpet, champion, clean, coat,
coffee, copy, counter, diet, egg, dryer, dry, expert, front,
back, up, level, down, handle, ice ….
Plus dozens and dozens more
Stage 2: Moving to the written word Receptive Phonics
Do this in a stepped and structured way e.g.
-select words that sound like they look – cat dog
pen
-sound out the words as they listen cat /k-æ-t/
table /teibl/ house / haus/
-do NOT spell them out using the alphabet pig p-i-g
Receptive checking – which do you hear? pen pan pin
This should only be done with real words – words that
will come in their first stories
Stage 3: Productive phonics
Students now sound out regularly spelled words
Flash cards
Speed identification and say
Introduce them in a logical sequence from transparent
to opaque
-> phonically regular words at hot bed cup
-> combinations spin chip this thing walked
-> Long vowel words say baby tiny
-> etc.
Stage 4: Phrase level Phonics
Move from words to short phrases and sentences
Receptive before productive (listening before saying)
Regular spellings to more complex spellings
Stage 5: Choose the right stories
Start with highly visual very simple stories with almost
no words e.g. Oxford Reading Tree
Highly repetitive sentence patterns for consolidation
Things to watch for
Find books with dialogs
Watch for difficult language
Stage 6: Visualizing stories - Listening
Now they need to hear the words in
context through listening to stories
with:
Highly visual picture books (watch and
listen)
Use lots of loanwords
Re-tell the story for repetitive practice
by varying it:
Change the story in subtle ways
Purposefully add in mistakes they
have to listen for
Stage 7: Visualizing stories : Reading aloud
Students read along or repeat the story they are listening
to (matching sounds with words)
But only after their comprehension has been checked
They read aloud so you can check they can match sounds
to words
Lots of personal one-to-one
reading is important here
(use teaching assistants,
parents, volunteers)
Stage 8: Reading on their own in class
Silent reading well within their
ability level
Build reading speed
No reading aloud (except the
occasional check)
Aim is to internalize the reading
Select high contextual / visual
books they can learn from
without much intervention of the teacher
Stage 9: At home reading
Students take books home to read
Ask the kids to read to their parents (parents fill in a
form). If parents don’t understand, the child can explain.
Seishin 2005 Book Sharing program:
Parents and children valued
their reading
Huge increases in motivation
for English in 6 months
Parent/school relations vastly increased
Parent / child relationships benefited
Reading at the right level
Reading at the right level
Be careful with Native-level materials
Native books, magazines etc. above the very earliest levels are
too hard to read fluently for MOST Japanese learners
Children’s books for natives are full of difficult words, phrases
and concepts
Native children already know 5000 words and almost all the
grammar BEFORE they start to read
Japanese children know very few English words and no grammar
before they start English.
Don’t confuse the final target (to read native texts) with the
starting point and the way to get there.
Graded readers
Graded readers
Graded readers
are GRADED
Native
books
Phonics
Easy vocab
Easy grammar
More difficult vocab
More difficult grammar
Easiest level
Very few words
Very basic vocabulary
Regular spellings
Very conversational
20-80 words per book
Beginner level
Easy vocabulary
Basic tenses only
Very simple plot
High visual support
100-300 words per book
Late beginner
level
• Easy vocabulary
• Present tenses only
• Very simple plot
Elementary
Little bit more difficult
vocabulary
More difficult grammar
More complex plot
High
Upper Elementary
levellevel
beginner
• Little bit more difficult
vocabulary
• More difficult grammar
• Harder plot
Harder vocabulary
Harder grammar
Longer sentences
More irregular language
More complex plot
1000-2000 words per book
Preparing kids for JHS
At present there’s almost no communication between
ES and JHS
Given MEXT’s ‘do as you wish’ attitude this will lead to
more imbalance, greater diversity in student abilities by
the start of JHS
Need for a Grade 1-12 integrated curriculum
Main aim should be to leave students with a positive
attitude to English and reading in general
Typical learning from course books
Recycling rate in a typical 5 level course (225,000 total words)
Occurrences
50+
Different
words
456
30-49 20-29
10-19
5-9
1-4
Total
225
466
575
1315
3,239
15.31% 6.24% 6.95%
14.39%
17.75%
202
40.60% 100.00%
1. 40 function words (in, of, the, by etc.) accounted for 41.2% of the total
words in the series
2. If we set “acquisition” at 20 occurrences, then we can expect students to
know:
• (456+202+225=) 883 words by the end of three years receptively
• 200 words productively (typically productive is 20-25% of the receptive)
3. This does not include the learning of collocations, colligations, idioms,
phrases, multiple meanings, lexical chunks, sentence heads… etc.
Data from Sequences by Heinle Cengage
Course book plus Extensive Reading
Vocabulary gains by adding 1 graded reader per week
50+
30-49
20-29
10-19
5-9
1-4
Total
1,023
283
250
539
570
Total
25.64%
7.09%
6.27%
13.51%
14.29%
1325
3,990
33.21% 100.00%
1. 76% improvement in ‘learnt’ vocabulary (880 --->1556 words)
2. More of the words in their course book reach the ‘acquisition’
level (27% ---> 40%)
3. Smaller % of unknown words
4. They will have a better sense of how the vocabulary and grammar
fit together
5. They will have a better sense of collocation, and other deeper
aspects of vocabulary acquisition as well as picking up phrases and
so forth.
www.robwaring.org/ER
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