Reciprocity between Fluency and Prosody: Acquiring Fluency and Prosody through Poetry Reading

Facing the students’ low performance of voicing English, I’d like to say they are the refugees of English education in Japan. It seems something crucial for English education has been missing. In this paper I make a hypothesis that English education in Japan has neglected the efficacy of the aural aspects of English. In other words it doesn’t have the scheme that a student may learn to speak English naturally. The way American children learn English will give us a clue for it. We have two key words for it: fluency and prosody. They can speak English naturally listening to a mother and a father but without proper reading education such as prosody they cannot read aloud English fluently. This paper consists of three sections. At first the previous researches of fluency and prosody in Japan are overviewed. Next is how English native children learn English. From listening and speaking to reading and writing English gets harder for them to learn. They need to train reading by acquiring fluency and prosody. Reciting a rhymed verse or performing poetry reading have been said to be effective for a child to read aloud fluently. Finally it’s helpful to look at the situation of primary education in America described in a text book on primary education in which an author emphasized the importance of fluency and prosody. What we need in voicing out naturally are to understand the aspect of a body when we speak aloud and to acquire the competence of it. A poet is a master who can command a word with fluency and prosody. In that sense practicing poetry recitation is very effective to get the reading power.departmental bulletin pape