How will the start of this Year compare to next?
I’m going to pre-empt this blog post by saying I’m not here to throw anyone off their game, you do you. So with that in mind, feel free to read on or click away.
Imagine, it’s Term 1 day 1 2024, a new school year. Another bunch of fresh faces await you the period after lunch - lucky you! If you’re a Japanese teacher like me, you’re more than likely going to have to teach Hiragana this term to some degree. Ready to bust out the flashcards for another round of explaining what an antenna and keg are to a 13 year old? (only the most niche references for my fellow Japanese teachers)
Allow me explain my teaching situation a little. I live in a rural-ish area, the majority of times I see my students, they are first time language students. This isn’t to minimize the work my local Primary School teachers do, they do such great work with the opportunities given to them. I’m talking about a selection of students I encounter each year who have never been in a dedicated class just for language multiple times a week (actually some students genuinely seem to have had zero second language experience). These students effectively have no idea how the subject is taught, which is something they can’t really say for every subject. Sure they have different experiences from other teachers and classes, but they don’t really understand what is normal or irregular in a language classroom…. until they do.
As a Japanese teacher, if I asked you which is more complicated Hiragana or Kanji, my guess is that you would likely answer Kanji. Right? You’d kind of have to I imagine. Its certainly harder for me, its that insurmountable mountain I decide to try and climb every few years (ahem…barely making it past base-camp if we’re to be honest). What if you asked an absolute beginner though? How could they know? Their answer would surely be based on guesswork. What if you showed a beginner these squiggly things おんな and 女, then asked which is more difficult in their eyes. This is kind of my point, students don’t know what is normal or irregular, easy or difficult…. until they do. Now a question to you the teacher, which would be easier to explain on the spot? Which could you expand on and create an opportunity to explore Japanese culture? Which is easier to teach with your current method? While Hiragana has to be taught in some capacity, I wonder if our/my/this Term 1 ritual is not the only way. For my students, encountering a page full of Hiragana and Kanji is normal in the first few weeks, because they don’t know what is normal or irregular, easy or difficult… until they do.
I don’t have all the answers here, but I will say that this is an area I have tried to explore, both successfully and unsuccessfully (less successfully? Failing upwards at worst). There is a reading strategy called Cold Character Reading (CCR), developed by Dr Terry Waltz (2015). Whilst it is associated with TPRS and Chinese language learning, I have attended one of her online workshops and I can tell you that there is a tight little group of teachers applying the strategy to Japanese as well (shout out to the CCR group over on Japanese and Korean TPRS Teachers). I’m not going to go through the strategy, you can just click on the link above and perhaps check out a workshop or get her book, but I will say that teachers have had an interesting amount of success with it.
Using CCR together with the right reading, whether it be co-created with your students through TPRS or (in my experience) carefully created and told via Story-Listening, appears to be a valid alternative to getting out the flashcards in Term 1. An important point to make here though is that you’re probably going to start producing different types of students though. I’ve found that they didn’t really have had the same encyclopaedic knowledge of Hiragana that my previous students had, but then they also had no qualms reading a page-long story and understanding it. Conversely, if I gave one of my old students that same story, they could have read the Hiragana, but probably would have had no idea what it meant.
Whilst what I’m saying is just anecdotal and we know traditional flashcards work great, I can understand why you’d think “why reinvent the wheel when there are trade offs?” Well I want to talk about something called the Affective-Filter hypothesis. Here is a great infographic about the Affective-Filter hypothesis if you’re kinda new to it:
I think what I am about to say is a little different to the hypothesis, but not by much. I like to think of it as a tiny window that is open in the mind of a student. When they’re at the absolute beginning of a learning journey, they don’t know what is normal or irregular in a language classroom, easy or difficult, possible or seemingly impossible in a language classroom. The window remains open in their mind, but it closes slightly once they establish a baseline for normal, easy and possible. Once it closes, it is very difficult for your average student to reopen. There is no doubt that if you brought out the flashcards day 1 and taught the students all the Hiragana, you and your students WILL definitely experience success and they will have achieved a great thing. My thought process here is that they will also have established certain expectations for how things are learned in your classroom as you have established what they know to be normal. I believe they would have a harder (but not impossible) time dealing with a switch to TPRS or Story-Listening, this was at least my experience. Whereas, if you started with a careful mixture of Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji, would that not be their normal?
If you started 2024 with a story written in Hiragana, even included some Kanji for good measure, the students would have no idea that this is not typically asked of them. They will think repeating a page of Hiragana and Kanji on day 2 is normal, because you’re saying it is and you have taken the appropriate steps to implement the different approaches. This isn’t to say you couldn’t spend a whole term looking at Hiragana either, but I wonder if there is merit to not doing it straight away. What if it was done later in the year? How would Term 3 2024’s Hiragana unit look? How different would it look like approaching a unit on Hiragana when the students already have a fundamental understanding of the writing system? Would it look the same as a typical one? Would the students have a better starting point? How would you assess it? Would you have to explain the same things or could you skip straight past them? Would you get asked the same questions or completely new ones?
2024 is a long way away, but maybe its worth a seconds thought. Check out my fully resourced program for Term 1 2024 over in ‘Stories’ to see.
