Back in Week 6, I mentioned in the newsletter that the Japanese students were playing games so they could have fun exploring the language and that they were engaging in a process called ‘Cold Character Reading’ (CCR).  While there is quite a lot to CCR, it is the theory that students can get to the point where they can read and understand an entire story in Japanese without ever having been taught a Japanese symbol.  That means no instruction, drilling, practice, revision, flashcards, or mnemonics for any of the Hiragana (and in some cases Katakana and Kanji).  We HAVE been doing things though, constructing six original stories in Japanese this term, most with differentiated versions, totalling over 2576 Japanese symbols!  (For reference, the longest text an HSC student has to write is only 400 symbols).

It is a fascinating notion that the brain can learn a language without “study”, but it shouldn’t be so hard to believe considering most of us have done this with our first language already.  Now that we are at the end of the term though, it is finally time to see how the students went.

For their assessment, students had to upload a video of themselves reading and translating a Japanese story (with no notes) in a program called Flipgrid.  Which story they had to read was completely up to them though.  Interestingly, when given the choice between an easy or difficult reading, some students chose the more challenging reading, even though it was worth the same.

(Kaeden Gonzalez of Year 8 was one student who attempted one of the most difficult readings, having to read AND translate 479 Japanese words in 5 minutes).

Here are some extracts from one of our stories called Carrot Crazy which we did in Week 5 – it contained three differentiated versions, a ‘surface’, ‘deep’ and ‘beyond’.  Some of the main differences between the readings were their length, grammatical complexity and the addition of Katakana and Kanji.

Surface Version

Deep Version

Beyond Version (only 1 of 4 paragraphs!)

Whilst we are by no means done with our Hiragana learning, we are well on our way.  Following on from this, after about six months of learning, some students will be about to write around 50% of the things they can read, without any drills or instruction - so, see you towards the end of Term 2 with another update.

Mr Richard Petrucci
Language Teacher