Rei the reader!

I want to read!

Adopting Oxford Phonics World as our 'go to' phonics resource/series at Luna International was a no brainer, especially with covid-induced needs for online resources/presentation tools. We love the clarity of the materials, the logical presentation & progression. I am not a fan of the North American drawl that undermines accurate pronunciation in the audio of some units...but, I am very picky.

Unfortunately, we now have little brothers & sisters not even needing to come to Luna because they've grabbed a sibling's classbook and submerged themselves into the learning!

Screen time smasher!

Big brother Yoshi I have known since kindy...and he's been learning with us at Luna as well for a quite while now. He used to hide behind his classmates & not say 'boo' to a goose, but no more - a confident reader, neat writer & speller, and almost glib with answering too easy questions! Loosing games no longer a 'problem' either :)

I've been told his five-year old brother Rei is #OPW fan number one! As you can see, he's an independent learner...and has had to have a home screen time limit for the OPW app imposed to 15 minutes (maximum!) daily. Oh my word - if only we had that 'problem' with our students :)

I blame his parents..

Not fair?

As you can see in the pic above & videos below, Rei is an independent learner already. So, dad will be out of a job soon (as well as me!). 

Just imagine if every five year old in Japan had this kind of leg-up from mum & dad before they even get to elementary school? Game changer! Goodbye 'romaji' crap & katakana cribbing. Well done mum & dad...and thank you dad for choosing Luna International again for your family...like your parents asked me to teach you & your buddies when you were at elementary school.

Turbo-charged learning like this could/should be a game-changer for Japanese children. Tragically, I doubt very many decision makers within MEXT or BoE have the first clue about how vital a grasp of phonics is...especially with the ongoing race to the bottom which is 'providing' language teaching to children in kindergarten & elementary schools (and JHS/HS) from the lowest bidder/freshest face on zoom or YouTube/flashiest app on some administrator's TikTok feed. 

Fotobabbling along a Luna!

Check out our top of the pops this week!



Above, very early progress in Everybody Up (Starter) with 4 & 5 year olds.

Below, a curtain call for two students quitting to go to a juku - they have to 'learn' a different kind of English to be 'successful' in school tests. I have ranted and raved about this insanity before, but it still makes my toes curl. Both these lads started on the carpet at Luna in pre-literacy classes and are now on the cusp...over which I doubt they will clamber with katakana-isation, translation, death by grammar, insensible reading tracts etc. Goat? Has been got. So, one for the archive very soon, from English Time 4.

Talk to the cat? Learn with a sock?

A lot of people think that childrens' apps in iPhones etc are 'just games'. Well, they can be, if you don't take advantage of them.

A while ago I used a voice recorder in class for a couple of different tasks, and I was pleasantly surprised that the students were very keen to hear themselves. Not only that, they were also critical listeners (much more than me). They got competitive about the time taken, and passing the recorder around in a question/answer drill accellerated the activity nicely too - more fluent and natural.

There is quite a debate about the pros and cons of reading out loud. Yes, it is not a usual feature of English usage, but there's little other way we teachers can monitor what the children are able to read/pronounce. NB Not 'understand'! I have always asked my students to read their homework after we have checked/marked/corrected if necessary. I don't like the whole class speaking at the same time - how can I hear everyone (and for the same time I don't speak when they do)? Instead, I will repeat the sentence after the students, to reinforce their pronunciation. If I model first, they are not reading, are they?

Reading a lot out loud is counter productive. I do not want a performance - so we do not do this with our graded readers. Readers are for fun & internalised consumption (instead, I really like to milk the workbooks/quizzes etc which we use for follow up, vocabulary development, finding grammar patterns, spotting rhyming words etc)

A big bugbear here in Japan is conformity. In my classroom, this manifests as everyone trying to speak at the same speed, pitch, cadence. The dreaded katakana-isation. One of my classes does this so much I pulled all my hair out last week - extending the last syllable in their responses in a falling sound which is horribly unnatural. Still trying to iron that particular issue out, but my one hour a week versus the rest of their exposure to badly done English = feeling a bit like King Offa with his dyke.

Talking Tom, and a number of other "Talking...." apps are very useful indeed. Basically a voice recorder with attitude - an animated cat does a few moves and doen't like being poked or punched (who does?) - so children are allowed to do that after they have done the job. And the job is? Read your sentence through, from start to finish, without pausing. If you pause, the cat will repeat what you just said. Daft? Yes. Annoying? Yes. Judgemental? No. Does it work with longer utterances? Not really. All I want with my young students for now is for them to get to the end of their sentences once they start. The cat repeating their production is funny, but not useful for pronunciation (the voice is distorted). It IS useful for intonation though - usually very difficult to provide feedback on. It picks up all chatter and giggles, which is nice as it breaks the ice...it also means everyone has to take a breath before they start. Good. Students realise they need to preview the entire line that they are going to say, and you can see them nodding their heads as they practice internally with the beat they want to use. So we are getting word level stress and sentence level? How cool is that?

(Our pre-school age learners enjoy Talking Tom et al as well - it encourages them to speak up and try out silly phrases because the cat is just as silly as they are. They love to hear their own made up words repeated perfectly! Very shy children will talk to the cat much more quickly than to me or another adult!)

I wanted to share a Sock Puppet video too - but to do that I have to pay Y85 per scene. What a rip off - lots of fun and very creative, but could get expensive as we have a lot of talented actors at Luna. I like this tool because it has to be collaborative, planned, and quickly executed (30 second limit on the free version). Hope to share somehow, soon.

What's the best use of a voice recorder you have found?

Consonant Clusters for pudding

I always look forward to my Wednesday lads because they bring an interesting mix of attitudes to class. Takuro wants to talk about football all the time (annoyingly Arsenal) & today he started drawing premier league teams' crests on the board; Toru is all business; Kunpei tries to avoid answering any difficult questions at all.

Boys ganging up on the teacher!

This class chuffs me to bits, because they can spell very well indeed. I like our classes to use a dedicated phonics book to go along with their regular class books; the Let's Go Phonics series is super. They are now quite confident of two and three letter clusters at the start of words (eg SPRing, SHRimp, STRipe, THRow, SCReam, CHip, SHop,) and at the end (eg biRCH, beNCH, wiTCH, piNK, wiNG, haND). No big deal? Wrong - this is a monster big deal in Japan, as katakana-isation of pronunciation usually mangles these combos hideously & terminally. These lads know they do not need to break up the sounds with extra vowels in between, or lob an extra 'o' or 'u' on the end. This avoids 'su-per-ring-u' (for spring) or 'win-do' (for wind).

So they can read, they can spell, they can roll out lovely pronunciation with stress in the right place and exactly the right number of syllables. BIG DEAL! To celebrate their great work, pudding and a quick A-Z vocab game that Jim lost at badly!

Please don't podcast us!

Image via Wikipedia

I had to laugh when my 'very good at blogging' class asked me on Monday not to feature them in a podcast.
Seeing as they asked nicely, and had noticed the pod & listened, don't mind at all if they don't. Yet...

Instead I'll show you what we were trying to achieve today, by way of review. A little bit of phonic awareness, using English File (Intermediate). I'm a massive fan of the series (old, new, but not American!).

The actual tipping point was being unable to accurately place the stress the stress in longer words, after mangling a few dipthongs for longer vowels & vice versa. Occurred to me that if they were having problems locating the stress (speaking slowly, thinking in katakana, not voicing the sounds at all etc) then just maybe I'd missed a trick along the way too. 

To test my theory, after we'd agreed on the stress for a group of longer (newish) words, we'd write them out phonetically. I'm a big fan of using phonemes, but have found a lot of resistance to my 'destroy katakana' philosophy...yes, a few tantrums have been seen :)

In pairs I asked my crew on Monday to spell their words phonetically. Their last three texts have had the same table in the back, and the poster has been on the wall for heaven knows how long, so not an unfair challenge. As I suspected, we were not 'schwa-ing'. Mmm. What? Although locating the stress and saying the word, in super slow motion students were emphasising each syllable. Not a lazy schwa in sight.

Please understand I am not bagging my students here; something I have neglected to focus on properly revealed itself when the three pairs were asked to put their transcriptions on the board...none were the same. Almost none had an unstressed vowel sound...so we found a place to start!