Depending on the age and background of the ESL/EFL learners, a teacher needs to consider points for remedial and early reading.
A teacher needs to know which of her/his learners can decode with understanding. There are varying degrees to this important skill, and weak reading skills result from a lack of proper reading instruction coupled with poor reading habits.
Main Reading Components of building a Remedial Reading Program
Sound-letter correspondence (phonological awareness)
Word-meaning correspondence (including sight words)
Basic sentence understanding
What Can Help?
Fostering phonemic awareness (teaching the sounds of a language) can help in producing much of the sounds and sound blends. However too much dependency on a phonemic program can result in ‘technical reading’ – or the ability to read the word clearly, but with little or no understanding.
So what can you do as an EFL/ESL teacher?
You can start by taking this professional online workshop on supporting emergent literacy (Sessions 1-3). Learn about developing story language, phonemic awareness and phonics. Highly recommended.
Preparing Classroom Materials
- A Gold Mine of Phonics and Phonemic Awareness worksheets
- Limmericks can be used for repetition and rhyming. "Roses are red, violets are blue, sugar is sweet, and so are you." The student can change the nouns and the adjectives with their own words. Then they can change the meaning of the whole poem by using their own words in keeping with the rhythm.
Additional Articles on Teaching Reading
Phonemic Awareness: An important Early Step in Learning to Read
The Role of Phonics in Reading Instruction
Early Literacy; A Resource for Teachers ( And what a resource this one is!)
