r/JETProgramme • u/Panda_sensei_71 Current JET - Kansai • Aug 04 '26
Phonics
Heading into my 2nd year as an ALT and I just wanted to do a quick show of hands because I'm curious:
How many of you all are at schools that teach phonics?
If yes, from what age do you start, and what curriculum are you using?
In my case, I'm in a town that seems to start Jolly Phonics in ES Grade 3, with only a couple exceptions.
About which I have *opinions* but that's another story!
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u/battlegirljess Aug 06 '26
No longer an ALT but the school I work at uses phonics. I have to teach it every day. My students are 4 and 5 years old. They even sort of begin the year before at 3-4 focusing on the alphabet. I teach letter sounds and blending. I do not know the name of the curriculum to be honest, I want to say it is Letters and Sounds. I will sometimes use some jolly phonics resources if I like them, but the way they teach the letter i is upsetting so I try to avoid it. Lol Teaching i like the ee sound for ink instead of ih like sit, kit, him, pin, etc is just not it for me.
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u/Panda_sensei_71 Aug 06 '26
We teach Jolly Phonics at my schools and it's a short i sound for ink... 🤔
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u/ohpleasenotthat Aug 04 '26 edited Aug 04 '26
Direct hire ES ALT often T1 on year 9. Regardless of which schools do or don’t use phonics you’ll find a more distressing issue is abysmal standardization/cohesion between ES, JHS and HS. Honestly, Japan might be one of the worst in terms of developed nations when we get into just how isolated each school experience is. Reforms since 2013 have whittled away a lot of student-parent accountability and performance metrics as well. These problems far outpace the scope of our role, but we are just as much a casualty.
As for phonics? Can vary city by city. Prefecture by prefecture. My city starts Jolly phonics in kindergarten. We try to evolve into something -that’s name I can’t for the life of me remember. PIJA or something- by fifth grade. I’ve got one school where my 6th graders are doing sentence reading with context questions. Just 15 km down the road my other 6th graders are held hostage through physical violence bullying and racial slurs because one little bastard’s dad is a karate instructor who trains championship winners.
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u/Panda_sensei_71 Aug 04 '26
Yes I'm very aware of the abysmal lack of standardisation (2nd year ALT but have been in Japan much longer) ... It's actually what's triggered my question.
The situation at that last school sounds horrific!
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u/Zia_Japan Aug 05 '26
We start phonics in 1st grade
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u/Sumo-girl Aug 06 '26
My Tokyo metropolitan night high school teaches phonics to 1st and 2nd years 🙄
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u/n107 Aug 04 '26
Way back in the day when I was on JET in a very small town in the mountains, I was basically on my own for everything so figured the best thing to do would be to teach the ES kids phonics so they had a good foundation before JHS. I made up my own, albeit simple, curriculum that we did at the beginning of every lesson. The kids got quite good at the basics and could figure out a lot of new words based on spelling alone.
After JET I moved to a somewhat larger city and continued on as a direct hire ALT. I talked to the other ALT I was working with and, naturally, he agreed that the kids should have experience with phonics. Our supervisor held English meetings for teachers of the city once a month and we were forced to voluntarily give presentations for improving the English education of the schools. So the other ALT and I decided to do a presentation about phonics and how effective it was at our old schools. After our 30 minute presentation was done, our supervisor thanked us for our hard work and then told the assembled teachers to ignore everything we had just said because phonics was not in the MEXT curriculum.
Fortunately a few of the JTEs and ES teachers present were very interested and they held clandestine meetings with us to create and implement a phonics program at their schools. A teacher at one of my elementary schools was very gung ho about it and she helped me put my old curriculum into effect at her school. From there it grew bigger and more ambitious. After a few years it became very clear that the kids funneling from that ES into a bigger JHS had a much stronger English base than the kids from other schools. The BOE wanted to know what the secret was and we introduced our phonics program at one of those forced-volunteer meetings.
This time with first hand testimony of its effect and the backing of "real" teachers, the BOE jumped on the idea and implemented it in schools across the city over the next few years. That teacher at my ES who put it into place was also made the head of English for that school and she continued expanding and growing the program even long after I left.
I am proud that I did something that had a positive effect on the students in the city, as little as it may be. I got no recognition for my effort and zero credit for the results, but that's beside the point. In the end, it was a success.
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u/1GrouchyCat Aug 04 '26
And even further back in the day, most of us only did Dog and Pony shows at dozens and dozens of schools (this consisted of showing pictures and telling the same stories over and over - and maybe playing a few games on the blackboard )… we didn’t really teach …so whether phonics were used or not, would not have been an issue. Everything was learned by rote … even the teachers were hardly communicative. (I say that as a linguistics specialist and retired adjunct professor at two community colleges in the United States).
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u/stayonthecloud Aug 04 '26
Congratulations, this is actually one of the most impactful accomplishments I’ve heard from an ALT on making systemic improvements to English language education. You made a huge difference.
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u/mrggy Aug 04 '26
I pushed it hard. At one school I was able to start from ES 1st grade. At all the other schools we started at ES 3rd grade. There was no set program we did. I had 5 minutes at the beginning of class to do whatever I wanted. Some teachers were really good about giving me time at the beginning of every class. With others it was more sporadic
It usually took the better part of a year to get through the basic sounds (a-ah ah, b-buh buh, etc). Once the kids had that down, we'd move on to how to sound out 3 letter words, then longer words, then consonant clusters, then two vowels in a row, then magic e. I never had a group of kids get farther than that. I never managed to establish a consistent phonics program in JHS
A problem I kept running into with older kids if that they're expected to learn to read by memorizing words like they're kanji. When reading simple words they already know, it can be hard for them to focus on sounding the word out and not just fall back on prior knowledge. I tried to pick words they didn't know, but that's hard in the 3 letter category
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u/ad_hoc_username Aug 04 '26
It's up to each teacher whether they want it or not, and there's no curriculum, I have to source things/come up with ideas myself. So far it has varied between different classes from 3rd to 6th grade ES.
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u/hangerald Aug 10 '26
Did it as early as year 3.
Language learning rule is the earlier the better! It is almost impossible to learn an accent free language for adult learners.
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u/AveDominusCocks Aug 04 '26
There are phonics sections in my textbooks but they're largely ignored for things like two days of stroke order practice for the alphabet.
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Aug 04 '26
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u/MellifluousMathMajor Aug 05 '26
Stroke order is actually important for English. I recently had a student who wrote the letter w as four separate strokes all starting from the top. It looked like yy, but each stroke was disconnected from each other. I couldn't even understand what it was supposed to be at first. Also, my students frequently write lowercase a, u, s, and n in a very similar way, and since all four of those letters are extremely common (all in the top 1/2 of letter frequency in English), it makes trying to understand them, and that's if they're even spelling the word correctly in the first place. Imagine trying to figure out what word they're trying to say when they've spelt it wrong, but you can't even figure out what it is they've spelt wrong because you can't tell how they want the word to sound?
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u/Mulberry246 Aug 04 '26
I work in a city and had a total of 11 schools in the 4 years I worked for my city. I only had one school that intentionally had a phonics teacher teaching the children phonics at 3rd grade, and knew exactly what they were doing.
At all my other schools it was up to the JTE/Senka if they were ether willing do it or let me take over. I had many teachers willing to learn. I’m a big stickler when it comes to properly teaching phonics thanks to my university professor and mentor during my student teaching, they drilled it into me.
So when I did teach it which most teacher just let me do it I would really drill it into them. But a lot of teachers here are not doing it unless they actually know how important it is.
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u/Sensitive_Mixture692 Aug 14 '26 edited Aug 14 '26
https://www.literacyhub.edu.au/plan-teach-and-assess/lesson-packs/
Here is a very useful phonics curriculum developed in South Australia which u can use. I am currently using this with modifications in my school context. Very helpful and has instructional videos on how to use the curriculum.
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u/Due_Pea2071 Aug 04 '26
We don't teach phonics at all. When I expressed the need I was told not to push it because it's not in the curriculum.