Daily Youmiuri

2002/06/25 付けの　Daily Youmiuri
に、酒井先生の授業風景と、6/2のメイソン先生の講演内容
が紹介されました。
ぜひ、図書館等で読んでみて下さい。

下記は
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/newse/20020625wob2.htm
からの引用です。

Extensive English reading: a better way to learn

Midori Matsuzawa Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

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 favorite 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 preschool 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 color-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 emphasized 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 1 million words within a year, at which point they will be able to cope with paperbacks. According to the associate professor, about 20 percent 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 realize 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."

===

Beyond intensive reading

Intensive rather than extensive reading has long been a mainstay in the nation's English-language education system. Sakai found intensive reading ineffective when he started his career in academia about 25 years ago, because he found it difficult to keep students interested.

Beniko Mason, an associate professor at the International Buddhist University in Habikino, Osaka Prefecture, was driven to adopt extensive reading because she had similar problems with intensive reading. "I thought all that I'd done (in intensive reading classes) was to make students think English is just difficult," she said.

The two associate professors were among the speakers at a symposium on extensive reading, held earlier this month at the Scientific Education Group (SEG) Inc., a preparatory school in Shinjuku, Tokyo, where Sakai also offers classes of extensive reading to high school students and businesspeople. The school runs a Web site, in Japanese, on extensive reading (www.seg.co.jp/sss/).

At the symposium, Mason presented a paper she released several years ago that was based on research conducted in the late 1980s. The research targeted first-year students at the university in the Kansai area where Mason was working, and compared her extensive reading class to another class in which a different instructor used the intensive reading method.

The two classes took the same tests before and after the eight-month research period. The results showed that students of extensive reading had far surpassed those in the other group, according to the researcher.

When a member of the audience at the symposium asked if extensive reading could help improve speaking skills, Mason emphasized that she believes the approach is a practical way of learning English in a country where people do not have many opportunities to talk with native English speakers. "Once they can develop comprehension skills (through extensive reading), students can maintain their English skills...and as long as they keep up the habit of reading, I believe the necessary phrases will come out of their mouths when they have to," she stressed.

In addition, Mason said her research had proved that extensive reading also improves composition and grammar skills among students. "Why don't (Japanese schools) introduce it since the approach is effective and efficient?" she asked. "I believe extensive reading is one (of the possible forces) that can change the nation's English-language teaching system."