Young Learners

Teaching English to Elementary School Children

I took over teaching a fourth grade boy in April. This is his third year of learning English including learning how to read and write using phonics but he was still having a lot of problems with reading and writing even simple words. He is the only student in the class so I was able to spend a lot of time on reading and writing activities, going back to the basics of learning the single sounds and then slowly building up to two- and three-letter words.

He was quite unusual compared to most students I have taught who have had problems with reading and writing, in that when trying to write a word such as “dog” he would usually be able to write the last letter and often the middle the letter, but not the first. This would happen particularly when trying to write a word where the initial letter was followed by a different vowel than the anchor word he had learned for that initial letter. For example, having learned the anchor word “panda” for “p” he would have problems knowing what letter should start the word “pen” or “pet”. This problem was probably caused by interference from the kana writing system. Many students have problems caused by this interference I think, but it generally causes a problem with writing the vowels following consonants rather than the initial consonants.

The first step I took was to make sure he could read all the individual letters. We spent some time reviewing these in various ways. The game he liked best was a “race against the clock” game where we had a pile of letter tiles and we tried to read them all in three minutes. Next, I had a set of small pictures consisting of pairs of pictures beginning with the same letter, e.g. tent and toilet, panda and pen etc. These cards were used in various ways such as a “race against the clock” matching game, concentration, and as a writing task where the student would choose a pair and write the initial letter for the pair. From here we progressed to writing the initial letter after being shown only one of the pair. When he had difficulty I encouraged him to think of or find the other half of the pair. The third step was to show him the pictures and have him write the first two letters of the word - “te” for tent, “to” for toilet and so on. This really helped him to realise that words that seem like they would start with a different letter (if they were Japanese) actually start with the same letter.

He is now very confidently writing 3-letter words, and phonetically simple longer words. The problem I now face is how much correction to give him. With his newfound confidence he is attempting to write longer and less phonetically regular words such as “sweater” which he spelled as “sweta”. I don’t want to damage his confidence but don’t want to leave a lot of words uncorrected so have been selecting a few to correct and leaving others. I try to limit the words he writes to ones he will be able to spell but I always give him some freedom to write what he wants as well which is when words like “sweater” come up. However this is a much better problem to face than his previous reading and writing problems. As his confidence consolidates I will give more correction, and introduce more phonetic patterns so that he can attempt a greater variety of words.

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