1. CHRYSSA LASKARIDOU EFL STATE SCHOOL ADVISOR

2. Teaching literacy How do you teach young learners to read and write?

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

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

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

6. The English system  26 letters in English  42 main sounds (e.g., ‘tch’, ‘sh’, etc.)

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

8.  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.)

9. 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/)

11.  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.

12. Using TPR in teaching phonics Invite pupils to:  Touch and feel the new letter-sound A multi-sensory method

13.  Form it with their bodies

14.  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

15.  Sing and dance it ddddd hhhhh

16.  The pupils trace the letter following the arrows.

17. Lower case and capital letters We first focus on lower case letters In the same lesson we also deal with capitals

18. 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

19. Building Word Families ai Pain Train paint ay Pray Tray spray o-e Bone Cone home

20. Playing with word families

21. Rhyming We can make up silly rhymes and focus on specific vowel sounds: The funny clown is in the town Look! He can bow! The funny clown is in the town Look! He can bow!

22. REMEMBER ! Teachers should always detect and respect different learning styles and strategies.

23. Opaque words  What do we do with words such as “ one” “two” or “are”? We teach them as sight words

24. Help with reading Dots are used to show how many sounds in each word Pupils can put their finger on each dot …..

25. Do we teach Alphabet?

28. Other helpful material  Mini books  Colouring pages  Matching activities

29. Some tips  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

30. 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.)