rapid reading japaneseby akira miura; mayumi oka

Rapid Reading Japanese by Akira Miura; Mayumi OkaReview by: Michio TsutsuiThe Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Apr., 1999), pp. 109-113Published by: American Association of Teachers of JapaneseStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/489635 .Accessed: 16/06/2014 04:23

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JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION OF TEACHERS OF JAPANESE 1 109

Japanese," but it seems flexibly and sturdily bound and could be useful in the field to someone who has learned the basic grammar.

RAPID READING JAPANESE, by Akira Miura (general ed.) and Mayumi Oka. Tokyo: The Japan Times, 1998. Pp. xiv + 177. V2,600, ISBN:4789009157.

Reviewed by Michio Tsutsui

Rapid Reading apanese (RRJ) is designed to teach intermediate and advanced students of Japanese a combination of skills to improve their

reading speed. The primary target here is students who have studied

Japanese for 300 hours or more at the college level.

Three sections provide the core of the textbook: "Basic Techniques," "Practical Exercises," and "Challenging Texts." "Basic Techniques" introduces two fundamental reading skills (i.e., scanning and skimming) and other supporting skills, including the skills for identifying key information, predicting information to come, grasping the gist or overall idea, and identifying noun modifying elements for accurate interpretation. There are three subsections in this section: (1) Tasks for Scanning, (2) Tasks for Skimming, and (3) Tasks for Scanning and Skimming. Each subsection contains sets of exercises for practicing the skills mentioned above. The first subsection provides four sets of exercises, including those for developing rapid eye movement, identifying topics, guessing content from the context, and scanning for specific information. The second subsection has six sets of exercises for identifying noun-modifying elements, for rearranging scrambled sentences, for answering true/false questions, for

predicting following sentences, and for grasping the overall idea of a sentence or passage. The third subsection presents ten more sets of exercises for scanning and skimming.

The Practical Exercises section provides more substantial materials for

developing the skills introduced in "Basic Techniques." The twenty-five exercises here are based on texts from newspapers and other primary sources. The exercise types include extracting specific information,

answering true/false questions, creating titles, and identifying main ideas. Some exercises also elicit discussion and simple writing so that students can

develop language skills in an integrated fashion.


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110 I VOLUME 33, NUMBER 1

The Challenging Texts section is designed to further improve the skills students have acquired through the previous two sections. This section

presents six short stories with various exercises for comprehension and

prediction.

Vocabulary lists are provided for most readings. The answer keys for the exercises are provided in a separate booklet. The booklet also contains

teaching suggestions for instructors.

A common problem for advanced-level students of Japanese is that their

reading instruction has centered on what the text calls "language-oriented reading" (i.e., reading by decoding sentences); therefore, they cannot read in other modes like native speakers do. One of the problems of "language- oriented reading" is that it leads students to focus on language elements in the reading rather than on its content. Students who read in this mode often fail to recognize the scheme of a given text, grasp its main points, and understand the structure of the entire text even if they can interpret each

single sentence correctly. A more serious problem in "language-oriented reading," however, is

that this mode of reading slows down the students' reading speed greatly and, eventually, limits the amount they can read significantly. Because

reading is a primary means of learning new linguistic items and other information in advanced-level language studies, this problem severely limits the amount of language learning as a whole.

RRJ's objective is to improve students' reading speed by breaking the

"language-oriented reading" habit and by making content-oriented reading their predominant reading mode. (In this respect, both the Japanese title Sokudoku no Nihongo and the English title Rapid Reading Japanese are

misleading. The goals here are by no means the goals of speed-reading materials for native speakers, for example, reading three hundred pages in one hour.) To achieve the above goal, RRJ presents sets of reading materials with task-based exercises to develop skills necessary for content-oriented

reading. In my opinion, RRJ's approach to the above objective is sound, and, if

used properly, its materials are well-designed overall to achieve its objective. That is, in the first section (Basic Techniques), RRJ begins by explaining some key concepts of rapid reading, and then introduces basic skills through simple, enjoyable, and practical exercises. The materials here contain a lot of

visual information, and key information is mostly conveyed by lexical items,



JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION OF TEACHERS OF JAPANESE I 111

short phrases, and/or simple sentences (e.g., restaurant menus, travel information, event announcements, and dictionaries), so that students are not trapped by their old decoding mode while practicing new skills. Text is also involved, but the passages are all short and deal with simple factual information, such as explanations of tourist spots and product features. In other words, it should not be difficult for students to concentrate on the content. Based on these materials, the exercises ask students to do such

things as scanning for specific information, identifying topics, looking for

key information, predicting following information, and grasping the gist of a sentence or passage. The exercises are both appropriate and workable at this level in introducing the basic techniques of content-oriented reading.

The second section (Practical Exercises) then uses short articles from

newspapers and excerpts from other nonfiction materials. There are visuals in some articles, but most of the information is text-based, which makes exercises more challenging but not overly so. The content includes reports and opinions, so students can use their background knowledge and common sense to understand the content. The exercises here include those

involving looking for specific information, identifying main ideas, creating titles, matching articles and headings, and predicting following sentences. Each exercise has a focused task which leads to content-oriented reading. Because students are given vocabulary lists with the readings, the exercises can be comfortably executed in class without preparation.

In the third section (Challenging Texts), RRJ provides students with

longer texts from short mysteries, a type of reading which requires imagination and prediction. Although more challenging than those in the

previous section, the readings here are interesting and entertaining to students; they are expected to make students want to read. The exercises for

reading comprehension and prediction should help them further develop skills for content-oriented reading.

In order to assure its proper use, this textbook provides useful guidance in the sections entitled "About this textbook-To the Student" and "Before

beginning a rapid reading class-To the Instructor." An accompanying booklet is also provided with teaching suggestions for the book's exercises and with an answer key.

Most of the exercises in RRJ are engaging; students will be interested and stimulated by their content and activities. A number of the exercises are functional. For example, the Basic Techniques section uses materials like



112 VOLUME 33, NUMBER I

restaurant menus, travel information, event announcements, and dictionaries, as mentioned earlier, and presents exercises which involve scanning for specific information, exercises which are likely to occur in students' real lives when they are in Japan or are studying Japanese.

RRJ was written as a supplementary textbook. The reading activities in this book are designed so that they can be integrated into existing advanced classes with minimum effort. As a matter of fact, most of the exercises can be done in five minutes or so, and there should be no extra burden on students or on teachers if they implement them in class.

Although I find RRJ usable as it is, there are some things I would like to have seen included in this book. For example, exercises which teach readers to grasp the general structure of a whole text would be very useful. This skill is needed when a given reading is long, and the reader must skim through the entire text first to see how it is structured and what information is presented there. This skill is particularly helpful if the reader has a limited amount of time in which to read the material. Using this skill, the reader can focus on the parts which contain the information he/she wants to know, rather than reading the text from the beginning with no focus.

Such situations are probably not as common in reading literature and newspapers. However, they are very common in reading articles on business and technical topics, for example. Although the book includes suggestions to teachers about how to develop rapid reading materials related to their individual courses, the content of RRJ would be improved by the incorporation of different kinds of longer materials (e.g., business, social science, and technical materials for general readers) for training in context oriented reading.

Related to the above, a more systematic teaching of certain lexical items would improve the usefulness of RRJ. That is, in reading longer articles, certain functional words and phrases, such as mazu 'first,' tsugi ni 'next,' kore ni taishite 'in contrast to this,' and tadashi 'however,' play an important role in giving the reader a clue for predicting what kind of information will follow and for grasping the structure of a whole text quickly. Because knowledge of these functional words is extremely useful in rapid reading and because there are only a handful of such words, teaching these words



JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION OF TEACHERS OF JAPANESE I 113

through systematic exercises is desirable.

Although language teachers understand that reading should not be

merely the decoding of sentences and that students should be taught more "content-oriented reading" at a certain point, the reality is that the skills for

developing this kind of reading are not often taught. The primary reason for this is the lack of workable teaching materials. RRJ, with its substantial instructional support for teachers, its carefully-chosen content, and its well-tested exercises, should contribute significantly to this important area of Japanese pedagogy.

SHINBUN DE MANABU NIHONGO (NIHONGO THROUGH NEWSPAPER ARTICLES), by Osamu Mizutani and Nobuko Mizutani. Tokyo: The Japan Times, 1996. Pp. xiv + 146. 2 cassettes Y2,060, ISBN:4789008630; (cassettes):4789008649.

Reviewed by Masato Kikuchi

This is a textbook that has dual objectives. First, it aims to help advanced learners of Japanese to understand written Japanese through reading and listening to authentic newspaper articles. Second, the textbook aims to help learners develop conversational abilities to discuss diverse socioeconomic issues in Japan. With this textbook, the authors, Osamu Mizutani and Nobuko Mizutani, attempt to overcome the limitations of traditional reader-textbooks that only provide passive reading and listening comprehension activities. They believe that, in order to promote more efficient learning, it is essential to provide multi-sensory experiences in

reading, listening to, and talking about the same topic in conversation, and this textbook is their answer to a holistic approach to language acquisition.

To achieve its first objective, the textbook provides sixty independent reading lessons. Each lesson is presented in a compact, two-page format. Each of these lesson contains a passage to read adapted from articles that

appeared in The Japan Times in May 1994 through June 1996. The themes of passages are carefully chosen so that they encompass a wide range of issues that concern Japanese society today. These include economy, education, clothing, food, housing, changing values, environmental

problems, urbanization, and other life-style issues. The diversity of themes

among the passages is one of the strengths of this book. Since each reading



Article Contentsp. 109p. 110p. 111p. 112p. 113

Issue Table of ContentsThe Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Apr., 1999), pp. 1-120Front Matter"Picturing" in The Tale of Genji [pp. 1-25]Two Types of Zi-Verbs in Japanese [pp. 26-43]Marker of Unexpected Statements: An Analysis of the Quotative Particle Datte [pp. 44-67]Vernacular Theories of Japanese Honorifics [pp. 68-101]ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 102-103]Review: untitled [pp. 103-106]Review: untitled [pp. 107-109]Review: untitled [pp. 109-113]Review: untitled [pp. 113-115]Review: untitled [pp. 116-117]

Back Matter [pp. 119-120]

rapid reading japaneseby akira miura; mayumi oka

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