 My name is Eishi Kera. I'm a lecturer of Japanese at UCLA. I've been teaching Japanese for a little over 10 years now including other institutions. I've taught all kinds of Japanese classes during the past 10 years and one of the hardest and most challenging aspects of teaching and learning Japanese is reading. Part of the reason is because Japanese is written in a mixture of three types of writing symbols. Two of them called Hiragana and Katakana are phonetic scripts that represent sounds just like the English alphabet. And the third kind is called Kanji, Chinese characters, which was adopted from the Chinese language and it's been incorporated into the Japanese language and actively used and recognized as a Japan's official writing system since the 5th century. There are 46 Hiragana and Katakana scripts respectively. And Kanji, Chinese characters such as these ones, not known exactly how many of them exist in total, but around 50,000 individual Kanji characters can be found in a good dictionary. Once these phonetic symbols, Hiragana and Katakana are memorized, they are not that troublesome at all. But Kanji, Chinese characters is the one that actually causes problems to the Japanese learners and that becomes rather a troublesome element to learn. Ever since Kanji was introduced from China to Japan, in Hiragana and Katakana were invented in Japan, we use all these three writing symbols altogether in text. Take a look at this one. Kanji, Hiragana, Kanji and Katakana. All mixed. So, because of this complexity of this Japanese writing system, reading is one of the most challenging aspects of teaching learning Japanese. Also, what reading in Japanese makes difficult is that our version of the Chinese characters has not only just single pronunciation assigned to each character, but each character has multiple readings, pronunciations, and those pronunciations change according to how it is used as a certain word. Take a look at this one. Japanese language, Nihongo, Sunday, Nichi-you-bi. The second of the month, Futsu-ka. Pay attention to this Kanji, right here, right here, right here, and right here. All these three words share the same Kanji in each word, but each pronunciation for the same Kanji is different. So, we must know how to read words in context. Due to the nature of this complicated pronunciation system, it takes a tremendous amount of time for many students to be able to satisfactorily read and write Japanese texts. So, one way to compromise this difficulty of reading, especially reading Japanese Kanji, a phonetic reading guide in Hiragana, which is called Furigana, is placed next to each Kanji character so that people can read some difficult words, or especially for children who still need to learn a lot of words in Kanji. Look at this one. This is a Furigana, phonetic guide in Hiragana characters right next to the Kanji characters. But having the phonetic guide is actually rare, and it's unconventional in normal reading materials of what most adult Japanese people are exposed to and read about every day. Look at this one. This is a book I read. As you can see, there is no phonetic guide at all. It's all texts. Also, as you can see, Japanese texts do not separate each word like English does. In books for children, such as this one for first graders, each morphological boundary may be separated. But third graders books not separated at all, just like the adult people is reading. So Kanji is actually plays an important role in a sentence as word boundary elements. The use of Kanji in text makes reading so much easier because it clearly separates content words from such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives usually written in Kanji from some grammatical elements written in Hiragana phonetic symbols in a sentence. Now, you all know how much different and difficult when it comes to reading Japanese, right? So next, how we do in a classroom situation. Of course, we always do some kind of reading activities from our textbooks, which every chapter has some kind of a reading passage with some exercises to help students practice reading and understand the content. But depending on an instructor, time constraints, curriculum, and most of all, in elementary level textbooks grammar is considered more important and emphasized. So the portion of the reading section in textbooks is often very small. Look at this one. Reading section starts from this page, but all the previous pages are devoted to grammar exercises. This is one, this sample reading from one chapter, and this book ends right here. So only this much is devoted for reading practice. This is not an exception actually. Most commercially available textbooks are usually designed this way. Therefore, reading is not often prioritized compared to other activities, such as grammar and speaking. For most European languages, which already share the ABC alphabet writing system, being able to read the writing symbols will not really become so much of concern. Their students can still somehow say each word as long as they know how to read at the ABC alphabet, right? But a language like Japanese is completely a different story. Our students must first know how to pronounce the non phonetic characters, that is kanji, to be able to actually read the text. Otherwise, most of them in fact cannot even read on the spot when being asked to read text in class. This makes it so much difficult for us, the teachers, to even carry out this in class. Another fact is that many of our students who learn Japanese as a foreign language here in the United States normally don't get to use Japanese very often outside class. Some of them actively use it on a daily basis, taking advantage of this multicultural environment of Los Angeles, but that is only speaking. And in fact, when it comes to reading, unfortunately very few students actually read outside class for pleasure or for fun in the same way that they do enjoy speaking. I've done questionnaires and interviews personally about reading and almost zero hours devoted to reading for pleasure outside class. That is because I personally think that the primary purpose of learning a foreign language for most of them is to be able to speak the language, but not to be able to read the language. So for many Japanese learners, they consider that reading isn't that attractive part of learning. And sadly, reading becomes an insignificant part of their language learning goal. A majority of our students may have an attitude that they're just getting by with the reading just for the class or vocab quizzes or kanji quizzes, and neither of them want to improve their reading skills nor build vocabulary for reading fluency. Because of these tendencies, they're likely to have lack of motivation to read and reading in Japanese becomes a want to avoid part of learning. This clearly indicates that students' awareness and motivation about reading are very limited. Therefore, we always urge to feel that we needed to somehow raise the students' awareness about reading so that they will be more motivated to read and, most of all, find reading enjoyable. And at the same time, they can improve their reading skills while classroom reading is a meaningful, worthwhile, valuable part of language learning activity to all. Then I think about, so what drives us to read? And what is it that reading really means? My answers to these questions are very simple. Reading must be fun and reading must come from one's true intrinsic motivation. When we read something, it's because we want to read a certain book, online articles or magazines that catch our attention when we're looking at the titles or headlines. Also, reading must be something that satisfies our curiosity and interest. In other words, curiosity and interest are the driving force when we read something. So, at first, I truly think that these reading materials in textbooks are not sufficient at all, even though in books for second and third year levels. Plus, most of them are not interesting enough and won't catch our students' attention. Students know that they have to do reading because the class asks them to do. And as a result, reading becomes kind of a nuisance for many learners because of not only uninteresting reading materials in textbooks, but also kanji being as an extra burden and a hindrance to their reading. So, this kind of students' negative attitude towards reading and course material for reading needs to be improved. So, in order to overcome these issues, I have come across one of the interesting teaching approaches called extensive reading, or you may call it free reading. Students can read freely at their own pace and for their own interest and curiosity. Students can read something that can match their personal reading skills. Let me show you some of the books. Most of these books are written specifically for either Japanese elementary school children grades one through six, middle school kids, or Japanese language learners, so the language is adjusted accordingly. And as you can see, we have a variety of reading collections from many different genres, ranging from children's picture books, manga books, Miyazaki Hayao's movie collection, science books, random facts and knowledge books, history books, famous literature pieces, and you name it. Students can pick up a book that catches their attention by the title and that makes them want to read. But what about the kanji problem that I was making a big deal about? Some of these books have the phonetic reading guide on every kanji word, and some have the guide only for certain kanji words so that students can comfortably read them without looking up unfamiliar kanji words in a dictionary. And ultimately, by reading these types of books can help them get used to pronouncing and recognizing some kanji words that they have had difficulty before. Also, these books particularly are written according to each elementary school year. So first graders books have few kanji words. And for second graders, they have a little more kanji and so on. More kanji are used according to the grade level, so my students can build up vocabulary incidentally in a natural reading situation. I'll show you some. This is this book is for the first graders. This book is for the third graders. And this book is for the sixth graders. So our students can pick up a book that is comfortable enough for them to begin reading. And as they read more and more books, they have they can move on to more difficult ones and see if they can be comfortable enough to read a book that is one level higher. So with this way, there are some benefits of this extensive reading approach. One, students can continue reading books for fun, for pleasure to meet their curiosity and interest, which can create lifelong independent readers. Two, they are the ones who choose which books to read so autonomous learning environment can be created. Three, extensive reading collection can help them overcome the fear, hatred and hesitation in reading Japanese, because most books have the phonetic reading guide, and the language in the books has been adjusted. So students at any language level can enjoy reading, which can support a differentiated language learning environment. And ultimately, students can choose a book that can match their reading skills, so they can test their reading skills on their own by reading some books between the different levels of difficulty. Because all of these books are properly categorized by difficulty from level zero, which has no word or only a word or phrase per page, level one has a few words or very short sentences per page, levels two and 2.5, a few sentences or short paragraphs, levels three and 3.5, much longer paragraphs, levels four, 4.5 and five, the entire book is only texts. Now, let me explain what I do in my class. I have my students pick and choose any book on their own and have them read it. But before reading, there are rules for extensive reading that students must follow. Rule number one, no dictionary use. They are not supposed to use a dictionary to look up words. Rule number two, if they come across any unfamiliar words, skip them and continue to read. Rule number three, if they feel that the book is too difficult for them, or there's so many unfamiliar words per page, then stop reading and grab a different one. After students have read some, they need to write a book report in Japanese and aggregate them. In the book reports, I asked them to write about the summary of what they read in feedback and response to the book's content and their reading progress of how much they think their reading skills have improved. The students repeat the same process five times throughout the quarter. Here are some feedback from my students about extensive reading activity. I have started liking reading in Japanese so much. My reading speed improved. Since there's a variety of genres of books, it's so much fun choosing books that I want to read for the class. Furigana, the phonetic reading guide in the books makes it so much easier and enjoyable to read because I can actually enjoy reading. Since all the books are categorized by difficulty, that makes my reading so much easier and fun to choose my level of books and see my improvement. Excessive reading has helped improve my reading vocabulary written in Kanji, and now I am more comfortable to read books with much less Furigana. I have learned a lot of vocabulary incidentally as they appear in the books. I now realize that depending on Furigana, the phonetic reading guide, so much doesn't help me improve my reading. I have started to be able to read so many Kanji words without depending on a dictionary because many words appear repeatedly in different books. I have gained confidence in reading Japanese now. In conclusion, I strongly believe that these books for extensive reading approach can help students improve reading skills in a way that they read. We read books every day, just like in the natural and normal setting. And most of all, the books can help them overcome the fear of Kanji, which is one of the most hated and least successful learning elements for many students when it comes to reading in Japanese. And finally, the books for the reading, extensive reading collection can help help my students start enjoying reading in Japanese and continue to be independent readers of Japanese outside class. This will conclude my presentation. Thank you all for listening.