How to teach Reading

How to teach Reading

1. While students certainly need practice reading material in English, it is important that you include in your reading lesson

   • Short speaking Listening Writing activities
     • How To Proceed With Teaching Reading
       • Warm up
         • Since students will mostly be sitting at their desks during a reading lesson, use the five to ten minute warm up period to get students moving and speaking. You are also going to want to generate some interest in your reading topic so that the warm-up activity flows into your introduction of the material.
           • One way to do this is to have students stand in a circle and ask them to tell you what they know about a certain topic. This can be as simple as giving you some related vocabulary. After a student has given you a word or phrase you can write it on the board and he can call on a student to go next. If appropriate you can bring a ball to class and ask students to gently toss it to the next person. This is good because it actually gives students something to focus on other than the words being written on the board which you will be able to review later.
       • Introduce
         • Your introduction may have been made quite easy by the warm up activity. Now, while students are seated, ask them to use some of the vocabulary they came up with in sentences and add any key vocabulary to the list. Now you can distribute the reading passage and ask students to read it silently to become acquainted with the new material.
       • Practice
         • Practice reading the material aloud. You can do this through a series of steps. First have students do some slash reading. You should read the passage aloud pausing where appropriate. Have students repeat each section after you and place slashes in their text.
           • A sample sentence might look like this “For Christmas dinner / I ate ham, / mashed potatoes, / and green beans.//” This will help students read more naturally. Now you can have students read the passage by repeating sentences after you and then call on students to read one sentence at a time. If students struggle with the pronunciation of certain words, take this opportunity to practice pronouncing them too. You may wish to have students read the passage again silently to focus on its meaning before moving on.
       • Practice More
         • With reading lessons it is important to ensure that students understand the material as well as any new words. To check vocabulary you can ask students to match synonyms, antonyms or pictures or ask them to complete sentences with the correct vocabulary words. To check overall comprehension, you can start with some true or false questions. Be sure to ask students why a particular statement is true or false when checking the answers. You can also have fill in the blank sentences or basic comprehension questions in this section.
       • Produce
         • Prepare some discussion questions related to the reading and some that require students to use key phrases in their answers. For beginners, discussions will be quite challenging but intermediate and advanced students will gain a lot from discussing their thoughts and opinions. In smaller classes there will be more opportunities for students to share their viewpoints while with larger classes you may simply have to ask who agrees or disagrees with a particular statement and then call on three or four students to express their opinions.

2. Ativities

   • Display letters and words around the classroom
     • Children are naturally curious. Displaying different words and letters around the classroom encourages students to ask questions about the words and learn without even realising they’re learning. Try labelling objects around the room like windows, doors, chairs and whiteboards, or pinning words like ‘black’, ‘red’ and ‘blue’ to the wall, with the font being in that colour. Children will learn to associate the words with the objects they see.
   • Create word families
     • Create word families
       • Word families are words that rhyme. Teaching students about word families helps them see patterns in text and encourages them to begin reading by grouping sets of letters within a word. Once they recognise the word ‘hop’, they’ll be able to find patterns in rhyming words like ‘top’, ‘pop’ and ‘stop’. A fun way to incorporate this activity into the classroom is playing a game using a cork board. Write a list of words on the left-hand side, and a second list of words that rhyme with them on the right-hand side (you could even try using a theme for the words, e.g. Christmas-related words in December). Place pins beside each word and have students link a piece of string from the pin of a word on the left, to it’s rhyming word on the right-hand side. Not only is this a fun activity to help students learn about word families, it also helps develop their fine motor skills.
   • Play decoding games
     • Decoding is the process of sounding words out. Once a child has learnt the sounds that each letter, or group of letters, make, they’ll be able to begin putting words together. Learning to decode is an important step in learning to read, as the more students decode words, the more quickly they’ll be able to automatically identify words. To make the process of decoding a little bit more fun for students, consider incorporating games into the process. This can be as simple as buying little finger puppets for the students and having them wear them while pointing to the letters as they sound them out.
   • Teach phonemic awareness
     • Phonemes are the smallest sounds in the English language, made of consonants, short vowels, long vowels, and digraphs like ‘th’, ‘sh’ and ‘ch’. Children must learn how different letters make different sounds. For example the ‘a’ in ‘table’ is a long vowel, as opposed to the short vowel ‘a’ in ‘sack’. Phonemic awareness means learning those sounds and how to manipulate them within a word, and is an important step towards helping children to spell and decode. One thing you could do to help bring awareness to phonemes and how to separate the sounds of words from their meanings is call up children one-by-one using their first names without the initial sound (e.g., [S]arah). The children have to figure out whose name has been called and what sound is missing.