Graduate Seminar

Wanda

He wants to know about students’ phonemic awareness. His tentative research questions are:

1. Is there a relationship between students’ backgrounds and their phonemic awareness?
2. How do students perceive English learning using phonics instruction?
3. How does phonics instruction in class affect their ability to recognize English words?

To do:

1. Understand how phonics instruction is done at Fuzoku ES
   1. Observation notes
   2. Curriculum, teaching materials, etc.
      1. Understand the sounds they have studied and the types of activities they have done to learn them
   3. Interview Sugawara Sensei
2. Understand well about phonemic awareness and its development in general
3. Develop a　questionnaire/ assessment tool to use by December 16, developing a good questionnaire/assessment tool will be dependent on 1. & 2.
   • Assessment tool should have
     • Basic information about ss: age, grade, gender
     • Information about students English learning background: English conversation school, living abroad, etc.
     • Information about students’ attitude towards English class and phonics instruction
       • likert scale: Speaking English in class is fun 1 2 3 4 5 6
     • Student self assessment of their own ability
       • I know the names of English letters 1 2 3 4 5 6
       • I can say the sounds of English letters 1 2 3 4 5 6
       • I can talk with non-Japanese people in English.
     • Questions to test their phonemic awareness

Genghis

We learned that scales might not be appropriate for some criteria. Descriptive categories might be more appropriate.

Teddy

We went over his literature review. He needs to think about the flow and how to connect the different topics. We also talked a little about ways of citing.