Category: Pedagogy

Why teach phonics?

Why do we teach phonics?

Because it works.

Earlier this month, I attended David Paul’s one-day “Teaching English to Children” course in Tokyo. (David authored the Finding Out series that MY English School uses in our elementary-age classes. We have him scheduled to present at MY this year in October.) I attended David’s seminar previously in Sendai about six years ago. Attending a second time after several years was a good experience. Sometimes we need a refresher in the basics.

One point that David stresses in his seminar is that we should teach reading using phonics because phonics works. Phonics is proven. It’s tested. Phonics gets results. It gets better results than any other system. Kids of all backgrounds learn to read best when they start with well-taught phonics.

In the couple weeks following David’s seminar, two news items popped to my attention underscoring the point that phonics works:

Mississippi

The first is a news article dated from last month about the Gulf States of Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama. This article offers a lot of hope: Mississippi raised its 4th grade reading level from second-to-last in 2013 to 21st in the nation in 2022. How did Mississippi accomplish this? By emphasizing phonics.

For those unfamiliar with education in the United States, education is determined and administered at the state level. Federal funding sometimes coerces states into following certain national standards, but states are generally able to set their own curricular and teaching standards.

For decades, Mississippi’s educational system has been the butt of jokes. When I was a student in my home state of Idaho, Idaho’s educational achievement was middle-of-the-road, but our educational spending per student was 49th in the nation. The one state below us? Mississippi. “At least we’re not Mississippi” and “Thank God for Mississippi” were common refrains.

No longer!

Leaping 28 places in state rankings in less than a decade makes it hard to joke about Mississippi anymore. Using a similar approach, Louisiana and Alabama have made similar gains and were two of only three states to see gains in 4th-grade reading skills during the three years of the pandemic. Other states are taking notice of that success. Phonics works.

NCTQ

The second item is a mix of good news and bad news. The National Council on Teacher Quality this month released its findings on elementary reading instruction in the United States.

The bad news? There is plenty:

  • Only 60 percent of American kids are literate by 4th grade.
  • 72 percent of teachers report using teaching methods for reading that have been debunked by science.
  • Only 25 percent of university teacher preparation programs adequately address five core components of reading instruction.
  • 71 percent of teacher preparation programs give less than two hours of instruction about teaching reading to English language learners.
  • 88 percent of programs provide no practice in teaching reading to English langauge learners.
  • 58 percent of teacher preparation programs devote less than two hours of instruction to supporting struggling readers.
  • 81 percent of programs provide no practice opportunities on teaching struggling readers.

In short, America is not effectively training teachers how to teach reading, and too many kids are not learning how to read.

The good news? With emphasis on the science of reading (with phonics as a core element), the United States could raise that 60 percent literacy rate to 90 percent within a few years.

Phonics is making gains. Mississippi set itself on a firm path a decade ago. Other states are doing the same and getting similar positive results. It’s simply a matter of will. Will states, schools, and teachers choose to teach using the proven method?

Sadly, there remains considerable resistance to phonics in American universities and among some educators. The misguided “Reading Wars” have left a terrible legacy in the United States. Teachers too often don’t know how to teach reading. Kids too often don’t learn how to read.

The Science of Reading

Academic and scientific fields have given themselves many black eyes in recent decades. The “whole-language” approach to reading is one example of this from education. Across many fields, however, science is flailing. “Science” as a term is frequently bandied in almost cult-like ways, aimed at discrediting anyone who disagrees. However, when 60 to 80 percent of published, peer-reviewed research is irreproducible, it throws up a question what it means to “follow the science.” People posturing rhetorically that they “follow the science” or “stand behind the science” are too often misrepresenting the science that they claim to stand behind. Consequently, trust in science and expertise is declining.

For me, the label “the science of” anything raises my suspicions. Is this posturing? Or is there real knowledge here to learn? When I hear “science of reading,” alarm bells ring. Given the mess created by whole language and balanced literacy approaches in the 1980s and 1990s, skepticism toward experts about reading is justified.

This said, reading has a science behind it. On the practical side, we have decades of experimentation in the classroom. On the neuroscience side, recent brain research has helped us understand the brain mechanics of reading. Reading and the teaching of reading are heavily researched, with clear answers about the best approach and practices for teachers and students. The NCTQ’s report neatly summarizes the five components of the science of reading:

  1. Phonemic awareness: The ability to focus on and manipulate the individual phonemes in spoken words.

Why are children’s storybooks full of funny-sounding nonsense words? These are often books meant to be read by parents to children (not decoded by children themselves). Dr. Seuss’s ABC remains deeply burned in my mind:

Big G, little g, what begins with G?
Goat and googoo goggles, G…g…G!

What are googoo goggles? Aren’t they just glasses? Why not use “glasses”? And the letter before that? What the deuce is a Fiffer-feffer-feff? Repetitive phonemes twist into words to produce utter nonsense.

The point is to build phonemic awareness. “Googoo goggles” plays with the phonemes, encouraging pre-literate children to do the same.
Likewise, why are rhymes important to young children? Because kids learn to match sounds and change words by manipulating individual phonemes. Children may not be able to decode the letters written on the page yet, but the ability to play with sounds displays phonemic awareness.

  1. Phonics: The relationship between the sound of spoken words and the individual letters or groups of letters representing those sounds in written words.

Phonics is the first stage of literacy, where written letters and words begin to form and match with spoken language. Phonics is not the end of reading. It is a tool for reading and a middle stage of reading. Decoding words using phonics offers nascent readers the best opportunity for matching what is written with the spoken vocabulary that they already know, in hope of then comprehending meaning. Phonics allows them to approximate pronunciation, opening the door to asking questions about vocabulary that they don’t know. Various context cueing, guessing, and other whole-language techniques simply fail to provide students the accuracy and speed of phonics decoding.

  1. Fluency: The ability to read a text accurately and quickly while using phrasing and emphasis to make what is read sound like the spoken language.

Teachers and students often refer to fluency imprecisely with respect to reading. What people often mean by “fluency” is closer to comprehension or sometimes speed. It is remarkable how little attention fluency can receive in reading lessons.

I am often guilty of this. I have spent dozens of hours helping an individual student produce clear phrasing and emphasis of a written text for a speech competition. In regular lessons, however, do my students read like fast-paced robots? Too often, yes.

Written language is meant to capture the rhythm, flow, and expression of spoken language. If students don’t read with the correct phrasing and emphasis, they are not learning to read well.

Reading fluency deserves more attention in teaching.

  1. Vocabulary: Knowledge about the meanings, uses, and pronunciation of words.

Reading is not a single skill or a collection of purely skills. Skills like decoding and phrasing are important components of reading. However, reading also requires content knowledge. This means learning vocabulary.

  1. Comprehension: Constructing meaning that is reasonable and accurate by connecting what has been read to what the reader already knows.

Comprehension is our ultimate aim when reading. To comprehend, a reader needs the previous four components of reading, plus adequate understandings of grammar and context, plus the ability to reflect upon all this and connect it to the reader’s existing schema. Whew…that’s a lot wrapped up in one component.

What does this mean for EFL teaching?

I teach in Japan. The above reports are from America. Teaching in America is to native speakers or in an ESL environment. Teaching in Japan is in an EFL environment. Does the teaching context make a difference for reading and phonics?

Yes and no.

EFL is a different context for learning reading, especially in a country like Japan that does not share the same alphabet with English and where children typically get little English exposure outside lessons. In this respect, teaching phonics is even more critical.

Japanese children start with a different schema from native English speakers. Their existing phonemic awareness is of Japanese kana phonemes. English phonemes are not going to map well onto their existing schema. How are Japanese children supposed to play with sounds that they do not yet know? Teaching phonemic awareness, phonics, reading fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension in this EFL context forces teachers to adapt from how teachers of native-English students teach. Regardless, the NCTQ’s five elements for reading programs still apply:

  • Japanese children need activities to develop English phonemic awareness.
  • They need phonics in order to match sounds to written letters and develop strong decoding skills quickly.
  • They need the accurate rhythm, emphasis, and phrasing that come with fluency.
  • Their vocabulary needs to grow steadily in breadth and depth.
  • Japanese children need the comprehension skills to make sense of texts and connect what they read to what they already know.

How we employ teaching techniques in EFL to achieve these goals may change. The target components of good reading instruction remain firm.

In my experience, sadly, most public education in Japan skips past phonemic awareness and phonics, or gives them cursory attention at most. Fluency instruction is similarly more miss than hit. The overbearing focus remains on vocabulary, grammar rules, and narrow comprehension of the current text in isolation. These shortcomings in public education offer opportunities for private language schools. Phonics and good reading instruction help students grow.

How does your school’s teacher training and reading time match with the NCTQ criteria for science-based reading instruction?

How about the TEFL certificates that teachers at your school have taken? Do those TEFL certificate programs teach science-based reading?

How do your students learn phonemic awareness? How well are they using phonics to bridge between sounds and written letters? What are you doing with students to develop their reading fluency? If you teach at a private language school in Japan, there is already heavy emphasis on vocabulary in public school–how do you deal with vocabulary? Are your students adept at comprehending passages to the level that they connect new ideas with what they already know?

These are a lot of questions to reflect on, which provide lots of opportunities to grow as schools and as teachers.

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Struggling with letting them struggle

“Let them struggle.”

Three words. One sentence. A concrete piece of advice that I have heard one too many times from experienced MY teachers who observed my lessons and whose lessons I have observed.

Three simple words that I continue to utter to myself whenever I plan a lesson and as I enter a classroom.

Several months into teaching with MY and I found myself struggling with “letting them (the students) struggle.” Since joining MY in the spring of 2022, I noticed that one thing I started doing more often than before is to reflect on my lessons, whether it turned out the way I had planned or had gone astray from the path I had intended .

And one question that I found myself reflecting on was “Why am I struggling with letting them struggle?” Is it the big brother side of me? Is it because silence in the classroom makes me uncomfortable? Is it because my idea of an efficiently managed classroom is one where things run continuously just like a Broadway musical where one scene almost always moves seamlessly onwards to the next scene? All of the above I guess.

Towards the end of the previous school year, I noticed some tiny changes in myself: I consciously (and patiently) tried harder to wait for one student to figure the situation out and ask the question I was waiting for or say the target language we’ve been studying. I told myself it was okay to see the students have a confused look on their faces.

Students successfully overcoming a hurdle made me see that letting them struggle does more good than harm.

I started seeing how letting them struggle is a way not just to learn about English but also having that skill to think and to make a decision on what to do in an unfamiliar, uncomfortable situation outside the four walls of MY. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a class of elementary first graders or junior high third graders. Students successfully overcoming a hurdle made me see that letting them struggle does more good than harm.

Through continued conversations with fellow MY teachers, the monthly trainings, reading up on language teaching on my own, and consciously making the effort to let the students struggle, I’d like to think that I am getting more used to seeing the students in unfamiliar and, at times, uncomfortable situations where they are struggling. And as I start my second year of teaching with MY, I also hope that, in time, I no longer have to struggle with letting them struggle.

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Fatigue & Recovery

Learners & teachers share the fight against fatigue in language classrooms

Why do some people give up when other people persist?

For a language teacher, this is an important question. The answer to it can help shape how we teach. Teachers need to grow resilient students who struggle through challenges.

For teachers, too, on a personal level, we can burn out. Knowing how to battle teaching fatigue is critical for teachers to remain motivated in our profession.

For a language school, this is also an important question. Students who quit after one or two years severely limit a school’s growth compared to students who continue with lessons six, eight, ten years or more.

From a management perspective, as well, employees who quit because of fatigue hurt the school’s ability to grow a professional, experienced staff. Teacher turnover at language schools tends to be exceptionally high. We want people to leave jobs for the right reasons–when they find new opportunities to grow–not because of work fatigue. If a school can keep teachers an average of even one or two years longer than they otherwise would, the gains in quality and productivity and savings in hiring costs are tremendous.

For language learners, too, why some learners give up is an important question. Most people have started a new task with a great deal of energy, but then burned out and quit after a short time. How can we better regulate our efforts to persist and grow over a long period?

A new study published in Nature Communications from researchers at the Universities of Birmingham and Oxford may help teachers and learners better understand how fatigue affects motivation.

The researchers matched up people’s willingness to persist in a physical task that earned rewards with brain activity on fMRI scans to show how motivation and fatigue fluctuate moment by moment. The researchers observed two states of fatigue occurring in separate parts of the brain. Short-term, recoverable fatigue builds after we exert effort, but it can be reduced with rest. Long-term, unrecoverable fatigue builds gradually with work, and it does not go away with short rests.

How does this help language learners and teachers?

There may be some differences in the fatigue felt from a physical task and the mental tasks of language learning or teaching. However, the stresses of language learning and teaching parallel the tiredness of muscles in many respects. There is a lot for language learners and teachers to glean from and reflect upon in this research:

  • Pacing and setting appropriate challenges is critical. Doing the same activity again and again for very long can leave the body and brain tired. Trying to do too much all at once can produce frustration. We need to pace our students and ourselves with appropriate challenges that spark motivation without building debilitating fatigue.
  • We need variety. Between challenges, we need frequent short rests. This rest might be something as simple as a relatively easy, unrelated distractor task to let the brain reset. We sometimes also need vacations to help prevent long-term fatigue from building up.
  • How we use rewards can make a difference. One aspect of fatigue that the researchers did not explore was loss of interest in the reward. How often were test subjects giving up, not because they physically couldn’t do the task anymore, but because the reward had become boring and insignificant? Receiving the same reward over and over can lead to a loss in motivation. I often see this in games with students–when each success earns exactly one point, students give up on the game quickly. When success earns a chance at a random number of points, students stay much more interested.
  • Meaningful tasks are better motivators than artificial rewards. The researchers did not measure the intrinsic value that participants felt toward the task. Squeezing a dynamometer is, on its own, not especially engaging. If there were no reward, would anyone have found value in gripping the meter tightly? Gripping a dynamometer carries no consequence…compared, say, to gripping a rope with a person’s life hanging in the balance.

People will sometimes invent meaning for themselves. If put into a group, some might motivate themselves by transforming the gripping task into a competition. Once the strongest grip was determined? This motivation would be at an end. Individually, a person desiring more grip strength might persist with the task as exercise, especially if the dynamometer could measure improvement over time. However, for most people, gripping a meter for a few seconds and releasing does not carry the feeling of having accomplished anything important.

Menial tasks that do not grow or build anything, that lack value outside of artificial rewards, are ideal breeding grounds for fatigue. Language taught in meaningful contexts, with fitting risks and rewards for failures and successes, will always sustain motivation better than drills or even than games that rip language out of context.

Students and teachers share a need for meaningful challenges. We share a need for agency. We likewise need supportive environments that create opportunities for us and ensure us time to rest.

Nobody stays motivated for very long with small, repetitive challenges, especially if the task lacks intrinsic value. We can trick our brains with artificial rewards only for so long. To stay motivated, we occasionally need difficult, novel challenges, and we need tasks with meaningful consequences.

A profound sense of accomplishment can grow out of a difficult, worthwhile challenge. Desire for accomplishment can generate persistence far beyond any reward. Desire won’t stave off fatigue, but it can help us cope and overcome fatigue until we reach a well-earned rest.

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(Re)learning to teach

What could you do without, if forced to, when teaching? Could you teach without pencils and paper? Without books? Without a white board or blackboard? Without songs? Without toys? At the current moment, for the language school teachers at MY, it’s a physical classroom.

From this month, in place of a room, we have a screen. Our virtual classrooms reach into students’ homes.

Welcome to teaching in the pandemic outbreak era.

Many language schools and services, especially those that focus on conversational practice, routinely offer online lessons. For MY English School, teaching remote lessons this month was a first. For me personally, teaching remotely has meant relearning much of what I know about teaching.

My first day of remote lessons brought me back viscerally to my first day teaching at MY. I had a lesson plan, but I did not know how the lesson plan would go, was not certain how I was going to execute it, felt unsure how I would adjust if plans did not go well, and could not predict how the students would react. Lessons at MY normally involve a lot of movement in the classroom and a lot of physical interaction with objects and classmates. Our face-to-face communication and engagement, especially in children’s classes, is heavily built around the physical interactions we perform in the classroom space.

Several of the basic tools of my teaching had just gotten removed from my toolbox. How am I now going to teach? Much of what I know about teaching and many of the techniques I frequently use were taken away on short notice. That was scary.

Time to (re)learn my teaching skills and add some new tools to my teaching toolbox.

What’s changed?

The differences stand out. I am alone in the classroom. Students are in their homes. Our classroom language has changed. We have to take turns speaking, and I have to make turns for each student to speak, because it is more difficult to interact with a lot of people speaking at once. I have to call students’ names more frequently. Students have to indicate to me, “I’m finished,” since I cannot often see their progress. Students need to work more closely on pace with each other because the online platform does not easily allow one student to move on while others are finishing the previous task. We are holding cards, books, papers, and objects up close to the camera to show each other. I cannot physically steer a student back into an activity. Many of the games that involve throwing balls, building towers, and running around the room do not work remotely, or at least they cannot work the same. My lesson planning time is taking three, four, or five times longer than normal. I am forced to do a lot of my teaching differently.

Changing my teaching practices has been a good experience for me. After years of teaching, I have fallen into routines. Most of my routines have developed because they are positive. Still, it is sometimes good to reflect on those routines, to consider how to do them differently, and to focus on the underlying goals. I am relearning what it means to teach.

What hasn’t changed?

What’s the same? For one, the staff. We have a fantastic group of teachers and support staff at MY. We anticipated that online lessons would become a necessity, and we made preparations. As soon as online lessons began, teachers put in the extra time and immediately began sharing teaching ideas and resources. Our advisor staff supported us and our students on the technical side and communicated with students and parents about worries. Having a talented, professional staff makes a huge difference when dealing with stressful changes.

Also, the students. We have great students. They are adaptable and resilient. With a few exceptions, they are excited to do lessons via camera and screen, and they are working hard to make the best of the situation.

In terms teaching, after two weeks with remote lessons, I have also been surprised how much feels familiar. One reason for this is the way that we teach at MY. Our curriculum is not a script that teachers read, nor a fixed routine that we follow, nor a set of materials, nor a collection of activities. Because we start with learning goals for various skills and content, we have the flexibility to achieve those goals with many different activities, materials, and routines. Take away the game that I often use, and I will adjust and use a different game to reach the same goals. Take away the cards that I normally use, and I will adapt by drawing pictures, using gestures, or giving verbal hints. Take away our physical classrooms, and we are adapting to meet the same learning goals in a virtual platform.

Student choice remains a central element of my teaching methodology. My students still construct language through the process of using language. Lesson activities still use fun to promote engagement. I still foster student curiosity and expect students to ask questions to find out what they want to know. Skills to adapt and deal with the unknown remain primary goals. A teacher trainer I worked with many years ago repeated the mantra, “Pedagogy before technology.” The basic principles and goals of learning and teaching have not changed. I am merely adapting to a new platform.

This is a scary moment for people around the world. It is a scary moment for businesses and workers. Many language schools have entirely shut down and furloughed their staff on reduced pay. At MY, our students’ education is our priority. We do not want a pandemic to disrupt their learning and growth. We want to keep teaching. I remind myself of an important command: “Fear not.” Fear is a physical response to get us out of immediate danger. Fear tends to paralyze strategic thinking, broad perception, and clear planning. Standing on a firm foundation—knowing what my core teaching values are—is allowing me to reflect on how and why I teach and to adapt to the situation.

The results?

Many students and parents were leery of doing lessons online. I was, too. We have experienced some technical glitches. A few of my lessons have, from my perspective, stunk. Overall, most remote lessons are turning out pretty well. Watching the students is fascinating. Many are excited to interact over a screen. I can see from their eyes that they are engaged for the full 40-minute, 50-minute, or 60-minute lesson. Some of my quietest students are suddenly speaking out in loud, clear voices. Distractions for many students are down, and many are more attentive and responsive to the language. Parents and siblings are often positively and supportively involved in the lessons. There are a few students who are visibly struggling, and I am working on how to support them better. This has been an exhausting two weeks of relearning the fundamentals of teaching. The second week of remote lessons was much better than the first, and the third week will be even better.

Looking ahead, I can’t wait to get back into a regular classroom. My small fear now is that my students and I might eventually miss the remote lessons. If there are some elements of teaching and learning that we manage to accomplish better online, that is going to make me rethink my teaching practices again once we return to the classroom. And that will also be a welcome change.

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