Extensive English reading, the way ahead?

Published on Jul 8, 2002

If you are studying English, but hate the grammar-oriented approach that forces you to read and parse sentences in detail, then translate them into Japanese, Kunihide Sakai, an associate professor at the University of Electro-Communication in Chofu, western Tokyo, has implemented a learning method that may offer a solution. What he encourages his students to do is to read many easy stories in English.

'I don’t teach anything in the same way [teachers usually do in] conventional English classes,' Sakai said of his extensive reading classes.

Arriving at the classroom, each student starts reading a different book by him or herself - without the help of a dictionary. Most of the books are thin, with pictures or images taking up the greater part of each page.

The students keep cards with notes on the books they have read at home and in the classroom, recording titles, the number of pages they covered and to what extent they had to translate what they read into Japanese in order to understand the text.

On this day, during the lesson for third- and fourth-year students, the associate professor walked around the room, returning cards that students had submitted the week before. In this class, encouraging and checking each student’s progress is the instructor’s main job.

'Have you finished up to this point? Splendid. How about reading shorter stories so that you can read 200 pages [per week]?' Sakai said to one girl. 'Why don’t you try an easier one - like this?' he asked some other students as he lifted a book from a cart brought from his office to the classroom.

If the students disagree with the instructor’s suggestions, Sakai does not force them to read the books. His extensive reading classes allow students to exercise their own personal taste so that they can find pleasure in reading English. Students can pick out their favourite books anytime from shelves in front of Sakai’s office.

The collection of about 2,000 books that Sakai has built up for his classes includes picture books designed for pre-school or kindergarten-aged native English speakers. 'I let my students start at almost zero level - books with just several words on each page,' Sakai said of his method.

In addition to works intended for native speakers at a primary school level, the collection also features graded readers - materials published by major educational companies for students of English. Graded readers are divided into levels based on the size of the vocabularies they use. The elementary levels usually start at 200 basic words.

'Even someone who has achieved a score of 865 points in TOEIC (Test of English for International Communication) has to start with reading materials written at a 100-word level,' Sakai said.

'What is often the case with people who have such a [high] score, is they can read short, difficult stories intensively, but cannot read ‘normally’, as they do in Japanese,' Sakai said. To help students get into the habit of reading in English, it is necessary to start from the first level, he insists.

The reading materials Sakai teaches with are colour-coded to indicate the level of the vocabulary each one uses. For example, there are pink seals on books with vocabularies of up to 250 words, while red seals are for works that use 300 to 500 words. Students who began studying extensive reading in April of this year are now progressing to books with orange seals, which means vocabularies of up to 1,000 words.

At one point during the class, Sakai emphasised that beginner-level stories feature many rich, vivid expressions. 'In addition, I’ll show you an American movie with English subtitles next week, which will demonstrate to you that only easy words are used in daily conversation,' he said. 'Therefore, it is important for you to repeatedly reread a lot of the stories with orange seals that contain up to 1,000 words.'

When one of the students told him that the book she had been reading was not so interesting, Sakai told the class: 'As soon as you find the book boring and difficult, you should give it up ... Feeling like that causes you to restrict your reading.'

Sakai said proper instruction was necessary for most students of extensive reading classes. The main job of the instructor is to recommend easier stories for students struggling with works that are too difficult for them, because if they are uncomfortable they will end up reading at a speed of only about 100 words per minute, he said.

'That cannot be called reading. If you don’t have much time to read, you should increase the amount you can read in the time you have,' he said, adding that an ideal reading speed is 150 to 200 words per minute.

Sakai’s method encourages students to take gradual steps toward the goal of reading a total of one million words within a year, at which point they will be able to cope with paperbacks. According to the associate professor, about 20 per cent of his students have reached this level.

Once they have progressed to higher levels, students are often encouraged to return to reading material at lower levels, which helps them read much faster, Sakai said. 'They realise what progress they’ve made when they read books they tackled in the past,' he said.

Maiko Shibata said she took Sakai’s class because she thought it would be easy. 'Starting with pages with only a few words on them, and reading more and more, I’m now able to read English ‘normally’ and I’ve found it interesting,' said Shibata, who has taken the class for the past year. 'Now I can read English without trying to translate each sentence into Japanese.'

Midori Matsuzawa

Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

Asia News Network

Cram schools by-product of bad system

Published on Mar 13, 2002

Tutoring centres survive because of poor-quality lessons in class

This week many high school students are taking the nationwide university entrance examination.

Starting from primary school, kids have to undergo after-hours tutoring for entrance exams at all levels of education because their parents believe by doing so their children have a future advantage when it comes to being accepted by a prestigious university.

High school students spend thousands of baht and make reservations three to four months in advance to attend crowded tutoring schools. Then they slave extra hours so that they will not be the losers in the fierce battle for university slots.

Are university entrance exams and tutoring schools to be blamed for the failure of education in Thailand?

Looking inside to the core of the education problem, we can find that entrance exams and cram schools are perhaps just two symptoms of ills at all schools. From the viewpoint of well-known tutors in three difficult subjects - Ouraiwan Sivakul or Ajarn Ou in chemistry, Chachchai Tungtum in English and Pisit Wattanapadungsak in physics - education reform is not tackling the heart of the problem.

"The general view is we're scapegoats for profiting from educational woes. However, what needs to be asked most is what makes tutoring schools survive if not for the poor quality of lessons taught in regular schools," said Pisit.

While college boards are said to be the reason students suffer from pressure, Pisit said that if a higher standard of instruction was conducted, students would could sit for exams - no matter what type - with more confidence.

"In general, people think students take courses at tutorial schools as a shortcut to universities, but that's only some of them. In fact, most of them are unhappy with their classes in school, saying they don't understand them," Pisit said.

"When students see the difference in what they gain in normal schools and extra-curricular schools, they can judge on their own about where they could get the most benefit from taking courses," Pisit said. English tutor Chachchai said that while improving the quality of teachers is essential for education reform, many teachers now believe that the student-centred method is the only way to go.

"To apply student-centred learning methods in classrooms doesn't mean letting students study everything on their own and teachers decreasing their role in teaching. Actually teachers have to adjust their style to tackle student needs and have to work even harder," Chachchai said.

He cited his experience in teaching teenagers at his tutorial schools, saying what was really needed by the students was teachers who were open-minded and kept up-to-date.

"For example, if slang or media-style spoken English is not taught at school, why study English at all? Who will students really be able to communicate with? If teachers don't keep up with changes, how can we move towards reform," Chachchai asked.

Ouraiwan, the popular chemistry teacher, agreed. As a former teacher in a public high school, she understands well the circumstances that prevent excellence in teaching.

Because of their heavy workload, public school teachers have little time to do research from different knowledge sources, develop their own teaching styles or prepare teaching materials like Ouraiwan does for her tutorial classes.

Teachers needed to be able to explain coursework and relate it to students' daily lives, so that they could see the importance of studying and view it not just as a path to college, but as life-long learning, she said.

Montakan Tanchaisawat

THE NATION