Teaching at a multilingual school can be extremely rewarding and frustrating at the same time as one cannot always express the knowledge to each learner during the lesson in the same way. Thus, having set goals during each English lesson is vital to the success thereof. However, goals will not grab the attention one seeks from the learners and therefore we need to use certain teaching methods to help the pupils understand the lesson.
My experience with foreign friends trying to speak English can be broken down to one issue; they struggle with sound forming (phonemic awareness) due to their home language not having certain sounds. One may say that we are trying to teach reading and not speaking, but the two are intertwined and a reading lesson cannot be understood if the pupil does not understand the sounds they are reading. The article, How Now Brown Cow (Edwin S. Ellis, 2003) illustrates how a teacher can use phonemic awareness activities during the reading lesson to help with this dilemma. Such activities can include but are not limited to, reading the content out loud with the learners and making sure the understand the pronunciation, choosing reading material with a broad spectrum of sounds and assigning sounds to visual representations.
Another aspect of reading and a good focus point for a lesson is phonetics. Understanding letters and what they do in each case is of utmost importance, as it is the building blocks of reading and understanding word formations. A good method to start a lesson in phonetics can be done by using an educational video clip to draw the learners’ attention and educate them while they are fully engaged. One source that has some really good quality educational content is a YouTube channel called Alphablocks and some great starting lessons with phonetics can be found there (Alphablocks,
2017).
Expanding a child’s vocabulary is a must in any reading lesson, even if that progression is one word per lesson learned, and working it into the lesson can be done using mini games (Flocabulary, 2018) during or at the end of the lesson, i.e. Simple List, where teams write down words and the team with the most words wins; Erase a Word, a game where learners read words in competitive play; Mini Game Show, the teacher asks a vocabulary question and if the learner can answer it correctly the receive a point for their team.
Comprehending what has been read is probably the most important part of the reading lesson, as it will assist the learner to acquiring new knowledge through reading for years to come. Thus, it is imperative for us as teachers to help our pupils assess and process what they read. Strategies that can help us add comprehension into a lesson, as described by Benchmark Education (Harvey and Goudvis, 2000), includes; visualisation of the read content through images or a movie, linking the content to real world scenarios, understanding what is fluff or important in the text and by helping learners expand their knowledge with the read text, i.e. changing perception and encouraging new ideas.
To conclude, there is no single method to rule them all when it comes to preparing and presenting a reading lesson. The proof in the pudding will be obtained by using a combination of the methods described above that best suits your diverse class’ needs.
Edwin S. Ellis, 2003. How Now Brown Cow: Phoneme Awareness Activities. [online] Available at:
http://www.readingrockets.org/article/how-now-brown-cow-phoneme-awareness-activities.
[Accessed 27 March 2018].
Alphablocks, 2017. Learn to Read | Phonics for Kids | Writing Made Easy. [online video] Available at:
Flocabulary, 2018. Vocabulary Mini Games. [online] Available at:
https://www.flocabulary.com/vocabulary-mini-games/. [Accessed 28 March 2018].
Harvey and Goudvis, 2000. Types of Comprehension Strategies. [online] Available at:
https://benchmarkeducation.com/best-practices-library/comprehension-strategies.html. [Accessed
28 March 2018].
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