Graduation: From Kid's English to Junior High English

Some of your students may be graduating from elementary school and going on to junior high next year. What are you doing to make the transition easier for your students? What about your students who just graduated in March? How did you prepare them for the transition from communicative English to what they might find in junior high school (JHS)?

This is actually a very serious situation for students. Many teachers report that their students do very poorly in JHS. Their students seem to forget everything they had learned as elementary school children. Many students have a very difficult time. They don't seem to realize that what they had been doing is the almost same thing as what they are learning in junior high. The difference is very big, with the text and the way they are taught. Also, another big factor is that many students do not know how to read even after many years of learning English. What we must realize as teachers is that in order for our students to survive and still end up liking English is to make sure they can both speak and READ before they get into JHS.

Another barrier students face is the level of English they had completed before going into JHS. Although our students usually attend classes only once a week, if we give them intensive lessons with a varied syllabus within the lesson, we can cover many more things in the same amount of time. It has been reported that an intensive lesson is more effective than one that teaches slowly without making much progress. This has been proven in our MAT classes with children learning how to use the tenses, infinitive and adverbs of time smoothly within a short period of time. With intensive class lessons, students can learn better and remember better as well. Progress is made with sure steps and texts can be covered more easily. In addition emphasis is put on output with feedback on errors and hints in Japanese as to meaning. Our students have shown better performance when they know how to say things correctly and understanding what it means.

One of the things we must do to help our students before they get into junior high is to give them “communication” skills which teach correct form (grammar) with use of “Key Words” in the mother tongue to help comprehension. This is important to prevent incorrect guessing and level gaps. Being able to understand spoken English will help the students understand reading and writing lessons while they are still in elementary school. That is why we teach the alphabet to even very young learners through songs and actions as soon as possible. As they learn the names of the letters and how to pronounce them properly, they learn to write them. There are various ways to get young children to write, however, if they are just copying each letter, they will not learn them. Instead, we get them to close their eyes and make an image of the letter as they write each stroke in the air. When they are see the image of the letter, then they are asked to write it on paper. Reading is included and taught in a unique and stimulating and fun way, not as a burden or something that is “too difficult”.

Another problem students face when entering JHS is that they may be confident in their first year studies, but cannot keep up after that. This is because most kids’classes are centered on conversation and the level usually does not go beyond book two. In addition, most conversation classes are centered on “communication” alone, with very little emphasis on reading and writing. What teachers must realize is that without reading or writing skills, students seem to forget what they have learned faster. We can see this happen when preschool children return from overseas. Within months, they have forgotten all that they have learned, even though they were fluent in English upon returning to Japan. However, their older siblings who attended elementary school retain much of what they had learned. This is because they learned to read, and as children get older, they are using more left-brained skills which help them reason and understand better.

Most teachers ignore reading until too late or concentrate only on phonics and words, not sentences. The best way to teach reading is by picking up the Q & A sentences of the text. These are important sentences that are repeated throughout the unit. Song lyrics are also very good, since there are so many repetitions in them. Students learn to recognize words and start to identify them and read them when they see them.

With words and sentences, in the MAT METHOD we have the important “Key Word Reading” system. Instead of just nouns, we teach the words that are important for understanding the meaning of the sentence. For example: I have a ball. The important words here are: "I have a” not“ball”. If “ball” is replaced with another noun that the student cannot read, the entire sentence is just a line of symbols like X XXXX X XXXX without any meaning. Knowing Key Words, students will be able to read and understand, not ignore and give up.

We teach sight reading early, as most of the important words kids need to know are sight words. We put them on word cards and drill them like we do the picture cards, in fun, active, innovative MAT 6-second DRILL Games. Then we put them into sentence bars. It seems in no time, children are reading in combination with the picture cards. It is a unique reading system that makes reading fun and quick. We reinforce what the students have learned to read with simple reading games, using the Q&A cards and cubes (always, everyday, WH- Y/N, H-, etc) and other visual aids to help them see the words as much as possible.

As students learn Key Word Reading, they also are taught MAT Phonics, which combines and subtracts sounds to get consonant sounds through what I call Phonics MATH. Through this method, consonant sounds can be taught in four lessons instead of many years, and short vowels through gestures.Kids can learn to read if exposed to reading in every lesson. They can "pick up" reading, just like if they see their favorite candy bar in English, they can "read" it.

One of the basic reasons Japan’s TOEFL scores so low is that students cannot read the texts fast enough nor understand them. Start systematic reading for your young students so that by the time they are fifth or sixth grades, they can talk and write simple sentences and paragraphs like many MAT students are doing today. When they get into junior high, they will know more and hopefully encourage their teachers to do more with English than what is in their manuals. And hopefully, TOEFL scores will go up.

MAT Phonics workshops are held periodically. Let us know if you are interested in learning more about it.

Ritsuko Nakata is the president of the IIEEC Teacher Training Center and creator of the popular MAT METHOD which uses intensive, but fun and effective, unique techniques to teach many things in a short period of time. She is co-author of the LET’S GO series, which is widely used in Japan and Asia. She has authored many other materials as well. She holds training sessions in Japan and throughout Asia. In addition she is advisor to the Seibu Bunri Elementary School, and Benesse’s Kodomo Challenge English Series with” Shimajiro” and is a board member of J-Shine.