Journal 1: how can I help my brother enjoy reading?

   First, I will identify the problem precisely. Is his hesitation attributable to cramming methods and physical punishments the hakwon adapted? If not, is that because of his unwillingness to study? Several problems are possible. And perhaps it is also plausible to say that two or more problems occurred at once. Clear identification of the cause should be preceded than any solutions.
   However, I will avoid asking it directly. If I do, he will feel uneasy. Instead, I would put it in indirect ways: why do you hate the hakwon?, do you feel the books are difficult?, have you ever punished physically in the hakwon?, etc. By eliciting the cause, I think I will be able to find the reason why he hates studying English. 
   After that, I will come up with solutions which are specific to the problems. In this journal, I will suppose a very general situation that he had lost interests on English.In this case, watching Disney animations or English cartoons together would motivate him again, I think. All of young learners of English love cartoons and animations whether they are in English or other languages. We will watch English version for sure, but caption is necessary. I am not going to say anything related to English rules or words until the very end of the animation. In the same regards, I am not willing to force him to understand the movie without caption. We will enjoy, laugh at, put ourselves into, the animation. Soon after we the animation ended, I will ask him how to write the title of the movie in English. For example, he will write "Aladin" if we watched Aladin. If he has any problem, it is totally okay to glance over a video cover or poster. Then I will cover what he had written with a paper, and sound out each phonemes of "A-L-A-D-I-N" as I uncover the letters I am pronouncing. And I will let him do the same thing with me. If he seems to copy my sounds, I will bring few names more from the movie and repeat the same process, but not too much. only two or three names are enough. We have tons of time to watch other movies and practice in the same way. The more important thing is that not to distress him.
    But this method can be too mechanical and boring, just like the crucial weaknesses of phonics activities. So I will try other methods as well. One thing I thought is that I can buy some books in English, something like pop-up books, toy books, or books related with his interests, such as car, dinosaurs, etc. For example, the book named "The very hungry caterpillar", which is redesigned as pop-up book, was fascinating when I saw that. To be honest, I lost all the words at the moment I opened the book because of its attractiveness. At the very first glance of the book, he would probably just look at all the attractive pop-ups rather than its contents. However, he would be interested in the contents as well in a short time. Human is a curious being. At that point, I will read it aloud first, and do it again with him, and then translate the sentence into Korean. For other example, I will buy him a book in dinosaurs if he is a big fan of dinosaurs as other boys are. He will find familiar pictures of dinosaurs and see the names or simple sentences written in English. It might be written as follows: tyrannosaurus, pterosaurs, stogosaurus, etc. Then he will be able to link the spoken forms of names of dinosaurs to the English names. Further, he might be wondering what the sentences mean. I can do the same thing as I mentioned above, anytime. In those ways, I can certainly motivate him to read.
    In sum, I believe that young readers have to be motivated first. Without any interest in English, it is simply impossible to learn it in their lives. To achieve this, we have to take a detour. In other words, motivation should come first although it would take time. The methods I mentioned are certainly time-consuming, however, I suppose they are highly likely to succeed. 




-- pictures of books mentioned--