Section 5: Teaching Skills

Chapter 34: Teaching Reading

Teaching reading in an English teaching class will revolve around building and using old knowledge in order to facilitate reading. For students to be able to start reading it is the bare minimum that they know all the phonics sounds and letters in order to be able to read. If students do not know what sound each letter makes it will be impossible for them to even read the simplest of words like cat or bat. After your students have learned each letter and the sounds that they make you can move on to starting to read. There are many great resources online for simple reading books and other things, so you should make sure to start from the appropriate level (such as books based on three letter words like cat, bat, and rat) and continue to review and move up as appropriate. As your students learn how to read, they will continue to advance over time and you must teach them reading rules as they advance. It is important to also work on sight words so that your students are able to read much easier as time goes on through memorization. Make sure to incorporate reading with vocabulary and photos so that your students both remember how to read the word and how to recognize the word as vocabulary. Making sure that you cover all bases with reading is important as it gives students a strong foundation when they learn to read more complex phrases, words, and even sentences in the future. In addition, when students begin to read more complex and advanced words, teaching them to break up words into pieces is very helpful, as doing the words letter by letter is not a great situation, as students often forget letters if they try to string too many of them together in a row. Try to make reading a skill that is learned piece by piece and students will easily learn and develop their skills in reading as time goes on.