Phonics ABCs

Chris Donner

OBJECTIVES:

To introduce the letter sounds and develop basic English phonetic awareness

SUMMARY:

One of my first fourth grade classes at my new elementary school last year, I was presented with an interesting but unexpected activity. We had been studying the alphabet: reviewing upper-case letters, introducing lower-case, singing one of the 100s of variations of the ABC Song… and now we were going to try the letter sounds, as in the phonetic pronunciation of each letter. I hesitate to call this a real phonics program because it isn’t nearly so organized or laid out along a clear learning path. Rather, in our class we would simply be introducing the sounds of each letter (1 sound per letter) in alphabetic order.

FLOW:

My first class began. I got to about the letter E or F when I realized how potentially boring this activity was going to be, with me projecting my rich American accent to the furthest reaches of the large classroom while the fourth-graders either dutifully but meekly repeated after me or just sat there silently wondering why we were doing this and how long it was going to last.

After another letter or two, I tried something. It was with H / hat, a sound that is much weaker in Japanese than in standard American English. So I shoved forward hard two times with both of my hands as I voiced the sound: huh… huh… hat! Suddenly some heads looked up. They had sensed movement up there. What was Chris-sensei doing? Maybe this was going to be… fun?

We continued with I, which unfortunately is the sound at the beginning of ice cream rather than sound in the middle of pig, but this is still a nice, rich sound in American English, deep from the throat and chest rather than the more forward, tighter sounding Japanese version. I really played this difference up, repeating the I sound in full voice three or four times before finally voicing the full ice cream. This got even more attention, and a good percentage of the kids gave this one a solid try.

Next was what has become my favorite letter: J / jet. Now I don’t know about fourth-grade girls, but when I was a fourth-grade boy back home, jets and spaceships were way up there on the cool index. Especially fighter jets. Perhaps some of that cool factor still lingers in this 39-year-old (err… okay, 40) psyche. Whatever the reason, before I could even claim to be fully aware of what I was doing, I had raised both of my arms up in the universal gesture for “ball turret gunner” and jerked them back and forth with each juh… juh…juh… jet!

The kids went wild. Every boy in the class got his arms up and made J sounds stronger that that piddly little thing they put in the front of “Jusco” and “jibun jishin” in Japanese. Some kids even leapt to their feet in mock dogfights.

After two repetitions of J, we got to the wonderfully comfortable kuh… kuh… key, which I mime with a “turning the key in a lock” gesture. This one the girls could participate in too. (Although there were a pretty good number of girls who seemed excited about the jet action as well).

All in all this activity ended up taking about 15 minutes. We repeated each letter 2 or 3 times, wherever possible accompanied by some exaggerated action, pronunciation, gesture, etc. I did the same thing for my other two fourth-grade classes that day, refining my technique and really getting into the process. Classes went well, but when the day was over I wondered how useful this had all been. After all, we would soon be moving on from the ABCs.

WELCOME TO THE CURRICULUM:

These first classes were on a Friday. The next Monday morning, I had two surprises waiting for me:

1. As I entered the schoolyard, rather than the chorus of “Chris-sensei, Chris-sensei” that usually greets me, I was welcomed with excited repetitions of “juh juh juh jet!”

2. My local supervisor, who is also the English coordinator at my school, greeted me with my weekly class list and schedule changes, and announced that we would be trying similar phonics activities in this week’s third-, fifth-, and sixth-grade classes. And we’d be doing it again in fourth-grade.

LOOKING BACK:

It has been about eight months now at my ES, which means students have had at least six months of this kind of phonics-style practice. The focus really hasn’t been so clearly structured, as I said before, but perhaps in a way it does have a solid structure. The goal is, of course, to improve students’ pronunciation. But beyond that, the students have heard an American pronunciation of certain English words and sounds over and over again, in a context that makes those sounds distinctly memorable. Even if their own pronunciation still isn’t so great, the awareness level among students is much higher.

Based on this initial phonics lesson, we’ve done some very simple phonetic spelling and substitution practice (a, an, ban, can, pan, ran, man, han, san, wan…) using real and nonsense words. We’ve also introduced two pronunciations – long and short – for each English vowels.

Our work thus far has been rather limited and a bit haphazard, but the students’ awareness of the sound system of English has improved greatly. Other than letter shapes and the occasional phonetic substitution practice, we don’t do any reading or writing at my school. However, with the repetition and the varied, more active presentation, our school’s English coordinator, the HRTs, and I have all noticed significant improvement in the students’ pronunciation. This is especially true during the phonics practice, but it also carries over to other English activities. Problem letters such as F, V and M, N and even R, L have become noticeably clearer and easier for me to differentiate. Students seem to be particularly adept at F and V, and definitely understand that there is a difference between these sounds in English and the katakana-ized フand ヴ in Japanese.

The L, R sounds are very accurate when students focus on copying me. I often use exaggerated hand placement on the throat for the R or stick my tongue out slightly in front of my teeth for the L to help them place the source of these unusual sounds. However, most students still have trouble differentiating between the two sounds on their own.

Participation:

Finally, participation during this ABC Phonics activity is nearly 100%. There have been a few times where we’ve lost some attention due to excessive laughing fits, and sometimes students get too interested in the actions and forget to make the sounds, but for the most part this has been an incredibly successful activity in terms of participation.

COMMENTS AND SUGGESTIONS:

For the ALT:

• Play with this. Don’t panic if a letter doesn’t seem so interesting. I try to keep things varied, and some letters I just leave kind of plain. For example, consider the O / orange; P / piano; Q / queen series.

I like to do a long ooooh sound followed by orange, then I mime playing a single piano key that goes pi, pi, piano; and lastly I rip through queen quickly with a simply say and repeat. I’m nowhere near dramatic enough to play a queen. Keep a variety of gestures, mimes, exaggerated sounds, etc. in your bag of tricks and shift through them frequently to keep participation high.

• Drink water. I have 4 or 5 classes a day, and doing this more than once without water will kill your voice, especially in the winter. I always have a thermos of lemon water in my classroom.

• Change focus. At first, I focused on F, V and L, R sounds. I was surprised at how much progress the students made on these. They do really well with that throaty American R, although the tongue flap L is still tough. But don’t belabor any one point. As soon as I saw progress, I changed the focus to M, N and Y. (“New Ear’s Eve?” I would say.) Recently we’ve been working on pursed lips for W and getting that “dsu” sound out of their Z.

For the HRT/JTE:

• Participate. My HRTs all participate right along with the students. Great inspiration, and great for the HRTs’ pronunciation as well

• Coordinate. You don’t always have to do A-Z. The HRTs and my English coordinator with often limit the time we have, and instead of the whole alphabet, we’ll do only vowels, or focus on differentiating D, P or M, N, etc. HRT/JTEs can’t run the main activity, but they are definitely involved.

For tests:

• We have listening tests each term at my school, and there are nearly always a few “What sound is it?” questions, where I say the sound just as I would during phonics practice (juh… juh… jet) and students then have to circle the correct flashcard picture on their test paper. They are super confident on these questions, often complaining that the test is too easy.

For the future:

• I’d like to organize a more cohesive phonics program at my school. Specifically, I’d like to do TH, CH, SH sounds, the R vowels (AR, IR, UR...), and the full range of vowel sounds in English, long and short and ambiguous.

• By choice we focus on speaking and listening rather than reading and writing, but I’m curious what affect a program like this, done for three or four years of ES, might have on JHS students – both their ability and their motivation. There have already been a few examples of ES students laughing at or correcting their HRTs’ katakana-style pronunciation of English words they’ve learned.

CONCLUSION:

A program like this seems to be ideal for an ALT in a TT situation. The ALT’s strengths in pronunciation, creativity, and natural genki-ness are taken full advantage of in a fun, short activity that produces real results. And the JTE/HRT plays a significant role behind the scenes in deciding what to cover, where problems lie, and assessing progress, as well as being a full participant in the activity him/herself and providing real inspiration for students to speak English without all that katakana jazz.