CHRYSSA LASKARIDOUEFL STATE SCHOOL ADVISOR

Teaching literacy

How do you teach young learners to read and write?

An important part of learning to read and write is being able to hear sounds in words

Young learners are already familiar with many words or language chunks but also with sounds which do not exist in their mother tongue.

For example, sound differences such as those between long and short vowels, or those between /s/ and /sh/ sounds are easily discernible by them.

The English system

26 letters in English

42 main sounds (e.g., ‘tch’, ‘sh’, etc.)

Reading in English

English is an exceptionally inconsistent alphabetic language because it suffers from a large amount of inconsistency in both reading and spelling.

A letter can be pronounced in multiple ways (e.g. the letter ‘a’ in English maps onto a different phoneme in the words ‘cat’, ‘was’, ‘saw’, ‘made’ and ‘car’)

Some letters have more than one sound (e.g., vowels and consonants like ‘c’, ‘s’, ‘y’, etc.)

How to teach phonics

Gradually move on to the more complicated ones(/ph/, /th/,/-th /, /sh/)

Forget about the traditional approach (the alphabet)

When we start teaching phonics, we start with one sound only. We start with the most common sounds (eg. /a/, /t/, /s/, /d/, /e/, /i/, /p/)

When you have given them the first basic sounds, you can start building with them the first simple words (transparent) through simple sound combinations. (sit, sat, tin, pin, pen, ten, set etc.)

Let your students create their own nonsense (or silly) words (testint, piten, satiapata….) and later their own nonsense (or silly) sentences (a mat in the tub, the cat sits on the hat……) and even short stories.

Using TPR in teaching phonicsInvite pupils to:Touch and feel the new letter-sound

A multi-sensory method

Form it with their bodies

Sing and dance it (‘h’ can be hop’, ‘t’ is playing tennis and ‘d’ is drum.

Each sound has its own action and song

This fun way helps the pupil learn the sounds more easily

Sing and dance it

ddddd hhhhh

The pupils trace the letter following the arrows.

•We first focus on lower case letters

•In the same lesson we also deal with capitals

More complicated sounds Later on start introducing the

different and more complicated vowel sounds and vowel combinations (/ai/, /ee/, /oo/, /ow/, /i-e/, /o-e/ etc).

This needs lots of practice and you will need to employ different approaches and techniques /methods such as games, songs colouring, matching etc

Building Word Families

aiPainTrainpaint

ayPrayTrayspray

o-eBone Conehome

Playing with word families

RhymingWe can make up silly rhymes and focus on

specific vowel sounds:

The funny clown is in the townLook! He can bow!

REMEMBER !

Teachers should always

detect and respect different

learning styles and strategies.

Opaque words

What do we do with words such as

“ one” “two” or “are”?

We teach them as sight words

•Dots are used to show how many sounds in each word•Pupils can put their finger on each dot

… ..

Do we teach Alphabet?

Other helpful material Mini books Colouring pages Matching activities

Phonics-based instruction is an ongoing process. We don’t teach all the phonemes till we come to the end.

After 6-7 phonemes we do other activities and projects giving pupils time to assimilate their new knowledge

Why learning with phonics? It helps learners acquire accurate pronunciation

It helps them make associations between spelling and pronunciation It helps them recognize and read

patterns (e.g., if they know how to read ‘leaf’ it will be easier for them to read the words ‘bean’, ‘eat’, etc.)