ELTWeekly Vol. 5 Issue#10 | March 18, 2013 | ISSN 0975-3036
The latest article on Oxford University Press ELT blog is titled “Five things I think I know about teaching reading”.
Barbara Hoskins Sakamoto says, “I’ve tried quite a few different approaches to teaching literacy over the years, initially with students learning to read in their first language, and now with students learning to read English as a foreign language. Like most teachers, I’ve settled on a fairly eclectic approach that seems to work well for me, and my young learners. Here are five principles that work for me.
1. Build a strong oral foundation first
When students begin learning to read in their first language, they have a working vocabulary of between 2,500 and 5,000 words. They learn to connect printed text to words that they already know. We want to be sure that our young learners have a strong foundation of oral language before we begin asking them to attach symbols to sounds, particularly since they will be working with a much smaller vocabulary to begin with”.