A whole language approach to teaching reading gives kids a whole linguistic picture of how words work. This includes teaching individual letters and sounds, as well as what the words mean in context.
Phonics allows children to read nonsense words, such as ones found in Dr Seuss books.
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English is a code-based language, with 26 letters to represent 44 speech sounds. Children must first learn to master the code if they want to be successful readers.
A Nal'ibali World Read Aloud Day in Soweto, South Africa.
Daniel Born
Speech patterns are just important as letter sounds when learning to read.
A boy in the Ivory Coast practises reading his letters. Children can learn a lot about reading from each other during the “School Game”.
EPA/Legnan Koula
The benefits of learning through play are well documented. In rural communities in South Africa, “playing school” produces passionate lifelong readers.
Phonics programs are not helpful for all learners.
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Phonics programs can be helpful for students with very particular learning needs - but it’s not a one-size-fits-all literacy solution. Here are some things you should be wary of.
Former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton watches as a youngster is enthralled by a picture book in New York.
REUTERS/Kathy Willens
Reading instruction in the classroom is a key concern for all teachers and there are many ways to go about it. However, is our determination for excellence in reading skills in our children killing their love and enjoyment of a good book?
Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka with a group of children in Lagos. Research suggests that literacy in a mother tongue is a building block for multilingualism.
Akintunde Akinleye/Reuters
Research tells us that multilingual literacy matters. But teaching children in Africa to read in their mother tongues as a springboard to literacy in other languages can be a fraught process.
A child’s reading progression isn’t based on age, so you need to know what stage your child is up to in order to help them.
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We all want young children to be given the very best opportunities to become successful, engaged and passionate readers. The teaching of reading is constantly mired, however, in a tired old debate between…
English is a complex language with roots in many others, and the teaching of it should reflect this.
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A new batch of Australian five-year-olds has just started school, eager to learn to read and write. Unfortunately for them, English has one of the most difficult spelling systems of any language, thanks…
Sometimes Fun with Dick and Jane isn’t so fun after all, meaning kids will disengage from reading.
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As school resumes for the new year, the “home reader” routine for primary school children also recommences. For many parents and children, reading these short texts can be the most agonising part of the…
Kids usually find more interesting things to do on summer break than read books…but this can interrupt their progress in reading.
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As the warmer weather settles in we know that it isn’t long before children are free of the restraints of school for another year. The regular reading that is a part of many children’s school day suddenly…
Getting your kids to read, and enjoy it, shouldn’t be so hard.
Flickr/Johanna Loock
It’s little wonder that we often feel as though our kids aren’t as successful with reading as we’d like them to be. The “reading wars” - the battle between sounding out words and using the sentence as…
Spell it out.
Alphabet soup via Brian Mueller/Shutterstock
Teaching children to read with phonics has been a central plank of recent “Govian” education policy. A new set of statistics shows that 74% of children in the first year of primary school now meet the…
Sacred time.
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Two initiatives aimed at getting children to learn and read more have just launched with a flourish. The $15m Global Learning Xprize pits teams of innovators across the world in a competition aiming to…