Marmara Elt Resources

Top 10 Tips for Teaching Basic Reading Skills

Reading is an important skill for all students to learn. It is essentially the basis of nearly all learning, and a basic requirement to progress in life. However, for students just beginning to explore reading, it can be an intimidating process. By building a strong foundation of reading, teachers will be able to help students to succeed in the classroom and beyond.
1. Teach an appreciation of words

Sharing stories is the easiest way to get students interested in reading. Whether it is the magic of a fiction story or interesting new facts, reading opens the door to information.
2. Create language awareness.

Before students can even begin to read, they have to understand how books work. Show them the proper way to hold a book, how the story is read from left to right and top to bottom, and use books with large print to get children accustomed to seeing words. You can also use worksheets or label objects around the classroom and the home.
3. Building blocks of ABCs.
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There are numerous coping strategies and activities that teachers can use to deal with the challenges of timing and student engagement.
Advantages of Teaching Small Classes
* Comfort: Teachers and students often feel more comfortable when the class size is smaller. Students generally feel more comfortable voicing their questions and opinions.
* Students’ needs met: Teachers can design customized lessons to meet the needs and interests of all of the class members.
* Student centred: Teaching is student centred and often more communicative than is possible in large classes. Students also have more opportunity to speak.
* Space: Students have plenty of space to move around in the classroom. Teachers can also arrange excursions (or suggest spontaneous ones) outside of the classroom where students can be exposed to real world English.
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The Cultural Dynamics of Teaching
Introduction
When children first attend school and embark on the formal processes of learning to read and write, school learning purports to enable children to realise and release, as it were, their intrinsic potentialities of interpreting written text. Moreover, this release of potential is supposed to help children acquire a higher-order cultural awareness of their society, so that they may engage in the use of logic, science and religion. This is what has been dubbed “the classical torch” view of literacy and schooling (see Thomas, 2000: 43 for further details), and it has been criticised on certain grounds - that, for example, it creates a void between literates and non-literates, and that if school fails to achieve its goals for many of its pupils, the latter are doomed, as they are incapable of participating effectively in cultural interaction and their society’s high culture. Nevertheless, even if some students fail to become “literate” - mainly because much of school learning is concerned with the “technological” features of writing (ibid.: 44) - they still have a rich oral capacity, which has been neglected or even ignored by formal schooling.
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Our ESL department has been recently trying to write new/revised course objectives for its three grammar elective classes. What we initially thought to be a routine task turned into an extended and often spirited debate about the role of grammar in ESL programs, what sorts of structures should/should not be taught at certain levels, why students can’t seem to use grammar effectively in writing even when they’ve studied it very diligently, why so few grammar books provide enough contextualized analysis of “real usage” in spoken and written discourse, etc. Read the rest of this entry »