Secret codes: Hiragana instruction in year six

Mastering hiragana at the primary school level is a challenge for beginning Japanese learners and developing techniques for easing the task is continual. The inherent meaningfulness of the subject matter is acknowledged to be an important factor in the learning, assimilation and retention of new material. This study examined the incorporation of meaningfulness in hiragana instruction by comparing two classes of eleven year olds engaging with hiragana for the first time. One group received symbol instruction organised around known vocabulary, whereas instruction was organized by consonant-family for the second group. The study was undertaken to determine the instruction1s impact on the recognition, decoding and recall of hiragana, the learning strategies employed and the affective response to the task. Both groups undertook formative tests and a post test involving symbol recognition and formation. Four groups of students participated in focus group interviews.

The reading theories underpinning the study were the interactive model developed by Ehri (1998) and the interactive compensatory model developed by Stanovich (in Samuels & Kamil, 1988). Both models hold that beginning readers use 'bottom-up' and 'top-down' processes when reading but the Stanovich model proposes that the reader compensates for weak skills or knowledge in one area of the model by relying on other sources of knowledge. A student may have weak grapho-phonemic skills and therefore support the need to extract meaning from the text by using world knowledge.

Test results indicated that whereas the two groups had equal success in learning the script, one instructional method was not more statistically significant than the other in facilitating hiragana decoding and recall. The focus group interviews indicated that the students were overwhelmed by the novelty and by the scale of the task. Students in both groups primarily relied on rote learning techniques, foregoing more meaningful strategies that had been modelled and encouraged. The results suggest that for young beginning students, hiragana instruction needs to acknowledge individual learning styles and provide a range of 'hooks' to facilitate item decoding, of which meaningfulness is only one.