The best solution to this problem [a lack of reading readiness skills in EFL students in Japan] is probably phonics instruction before students are required to open and attempt to read their EFL textbooks. Systematic phonics attempts to emphasize the regularity of written English and to create an entry-level fluency in learners so that they can go on to learn to read for meaning. (Jannuzi, LAC, June 1997, p. 7).
Stephen Brivati writes:
Although I am a convinced believer that a phonics-centered approach is the most efficacious way of resolving Japan's miserable failure in EFL--a view acquired through a great deal of experience teaching absolute beginners--I think that the paragraph [quoted above] underscores the divide between the two 'camps'. Specifically, in its separation of phonics and textbook, which seems to imply that learning phonically should be independent from meaningful text.
My most successful teaching at elementary and junior high school involved using the approach advocated in David English House's [David Paul's] Finding Out series. The approach can be applied by studying the manual and materials, but it is not really that easy to use effectively without attending the training course that DEH offers. I am not usually a great fan of training courses associated with companies, but this one is worth investing time and money in even if you don't teach children.
The course materials as implemented in the classroom systematically introduce phonemes through discovery and games. However, right from the first lesson students are exposed to the mythical beast, "oral communication", as they look at interesting pictures of real life situations, speculate on what is happening and then listen to the language of that situation, all the while observing the written word. Students can then act out these situations and use the language immediately, and as the course progresses, the gap between oral production and perception and decoding of written language narrows as students come to recognize the phoneme-to-grapheme correspondences and how they operate in context. Without this kind of 'whole wordish' counterweight, phonics is an academic exercise which is doing its own cause little good.
Charles Jannuzi responds:
These are points well made and well taken. I didn't explain enough in my article that I meant the official textbooks used in Japanese junior high schools. These textbooks are comprised of basic dialogues and longer "Let's Read" sections, but they do not provide the language support one would expect of either a phonics or whole-language approach for beginning FL literacy and LL. Also, allow me to say that I think that Japanese junior high school English education would greatly benefit from using supplemental materials like David Paul's or Yoko Matsuka's, which combine phonics and whole word methods for integration into the communicative EFL classroom. And, as Stephen points out, for effectiveness' sake, this would also require training of junior high English teachers and the native speaker Assistant Language Teachers (ALTs) so they would know how to use these materials.