How can I help my child with reading comprehension?

How can I help my child with reading comprehension?

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008 | Reading

christinewoodcock.com/.../how-can-i-help-my-child-with-reading-compr...

**This article originally appeared on qwowi.com**
As a professor specializing in reading, I am frequently asked this question by worried parents.  I’m not surprised, considering how complex and confusing comprehension can be.  Although there are no “quick-fix recipes” to solve the complexities of comprehension, I can offer some relatively simple strategies.  When applied consistently and patiently, these strategies will help comprehension dramatically.  The key is to make comprehension explicit with strategy use.  Since comprehension is in our heads, and is therefore invisible and intangible, as adults, we need to make our strategy use as hands-on, concrete, and explicit as possible.
How many times have you read an entire paragraph, or even a whole page, and you have no idea what you just read? 
It happens all of the time, to the best of us!  Even really accomplished readers suffer from this same problem at times.  That is because our eyes can float over words, and our brains automatically decode the words, yet we are not truly reading because we are not making any meaning from the words.  In order to say we have sincerely read something, we have to have derived meaning from, it. Otherwise, the glossy-eyed “reading” is simply referred to as decoding, and not reading. In other words, when we read, it has to make sense, otherwise we’re not really reading.
Comprehension is NOT natural for many people.
Many children are decoders, not readers.  Children must know that text is supposed to make sense. Similarly, lots of children, unfortunately, simply don’t know how to comprehend, merely because no one has ever showed them how to make meaning from a text.  The connections come easer and quicker for some than others.  Most adults cannot point to a specific time when they learned to comprehend.  It is something we just… did.  The problem is that some youngsters need and deserve explicit instruction in how to comprehend.  When this happens, they can grow up loving to read, and seeing the value in reading!  Not surprisingly, folks who have severe difficulties comprehending hate to read.  It’s a safe bet to assume they would love to read if they had explicit comprehension instruction.
Comprehension is an active, inner conversation
Unlike passive activities such as playing video games or watching TV, reading is an active process in our brains.  Strategic readers address their thinking in an inner conversation that helps them make sense of what they read.  Help to foster these inner (and outer) conversations with your children by discussing their texts with them.
Readers take the written word and construct meaning based on their own thoughts, knowledge, and experiences.  Help your child to make explicit, personal connections to the text they are reading.
Provide structure for your child to think when they read.  Children must develop an awareness of their own thinking, so that they can monitor themselves while they read.
Cognitive Capacity
In my other recent article for Query Cat entitled “How can we help struggling readers?” I shared some of the following pointers for children who are having trouble reading.  In our brains, we have what is called a Cognitive Capacity.  I sometimes jokingly refer to this concept as my “cup runneth over!”  In simple terms, when any of us feel frustrated with something, our brain power stops. There is only so much we can focus on at a given time, and the rest understandably turns to mush.  Unfortunately, we have all had what I refer to as a “meltdown,” when the stress of something just gets to be too much.  Typically, and sadly, this is exactly what happens to a reader’s Cognitive Capacity when he/she is trying to comprehend something that is just too difficult.  The child is trying so hard to decode a word– letter by painful letter– that he/she loses track, and can’t make heads or tails of the entire thing.
I know this may seem overly simplistic, but…
Your children need books that they can actually read!  When considering your child’s reading comprehension difficulties, the difficulty level of the text may be more than 90% of the battle.  When a book is too hard, your child is using up all of his/her brain power on decoding the words, that he/she simply cannot make any sense of it. On the other hand, when your child reads books that are comfortable, he/she can have the inner conversations and attempt to make sense of the text in an enjoyable and much less agonizing way.
8 Magical Strategies
When you regularly and thoughtfully work with your child on the following strategies, you will notice an impressive difference in not just the child’s comprehension, but probably in several other aspects of the child’s life as well.  When you teach a child to comprehend, you are also teaching a child to empathize, to infer, and to become a more tolerant, understanding person who can think outside of the box.  That is precisely why so many children struggle with comprehension—developmentally, it is difficult for children to get beyond literal, concrete understandings.  As the child becomes older, especially around 3rd grade and up, it is essential that your child gradually become more aware of others’ feelings and perspectives.  That will help him/her to understand various perspectives in texts, and in life.
Practice these strategies patiently, one at a time, with some favorite books at home, which also happen to be at a comfortable reading level for your child.  Remember, the more explicit you make the strategies, the better your child will comprehend.  Gradually, your child will begin to implement these strategies independently, but please check in with your child consistently to see how he/she is progressing.
1.  Make connections
The first of the strategies also happens to be one of my personal favorites, because it’s fun and straightforward.  Simply encourage your child to make personal connections to the content of the book he/she is reading.  You could even jot the connections on sticky notes in colorful magic markers and stick them in the book, or make a cute chart of the connections.
There are three different kinds of connections we tend to make while reading: text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world.
Text-to-self connections are easiest.  We merely relate concepts in the book to aspects of our own lives.  For example, “I love the lake in this book.  It reminds me of our summer vacations when we always visited that lake in New York.”
Text-to-text connections are also fun and easy.  Obviously, you just relate the book you’re currently reading to another book you’ve read.  Perhaps the characters in this book remind of the characters in a book you read last week.  Also, don’t feel constricted by the text-to-text label.  I always encourage my students to think of movies and TV shows to which they can relate their books, too!
Text-to-world connections are trickier.  With these connections, you want to relate what you’ve just read to a larger, worldly phenomenon, and not just something specific to your own life.  This is hard for children, for obvious reasons.  Children have little experience beyond their personal existence.  They have yet to truly understand the world.  Likewise, developmentally, it’s challenging for many children to imagine that other people even have different perspectives than the ones to which they are accustomed.  This is where the hard work comes in for both parents and teachers.  Encourage your child to think outside the box.  Show them in compelling ways that other people may think and behave differently.  This will develop over time, so be patient!  There more explicit you are with making text-to-world connections, they better your child will become at it.
2.  Infer
Making inferences is similar to the text-to-world connection strategy.  In order for children to adequately understand, they must be able to make inferences, yet this is a difficult concept even for some adults to grasp!  Gradually work with children on drawing conclusions based on what information they know.  Likewise, show them how to make educated guesses, and to look for hints to back up their reasoning.  You could make lists and pictures together to help this strategy along.  As always, model inferring for your child in an explicit way, so that he/she can see how you derive conclusions. Do you openly empathize with others?  Do you articulate how another may have a different perspective than you?  All of these explicitly modeled behaviors will help your child with the all-too important task of inferring.
3. Predictions
An uncomplicated strategy to foster comprehension is to simply ask your child to make frequent predictions.  Most parents and teachers make the mistake of only asking children to make predictions at the beginning of a book.  Instead, ask children to make predictions at the onset of a book, as well as at strategic points throughout the book.  This stimulates their thinking in a number of ways.  At the end of the book, discuss with children whether or not they liked the ending.  Would they have ended it differently?  If so, how?
4.  Visualize
One of the best parts of reading is to picture the story or the content in one’s head. Ask children to describe how they picture the characters and the setting in the story. If it’s non-fiction, ask them to draw their own pictures of the content.  Another fun activity is to compare and contrast visualizations between book and movie versions of various stories.
5.  Questions
Asking children questions is the simplest and most old-fashioned way to ensure they have understood material.  Don’t just ask questions at the end of a given passage.  I would suggest stopping at strategic points to see how they are doing throughout a passage.  Furthermore, the quality of the questions themselves can also determine the quality of understanding.  Most people only ask explicit, concrete questions that only pertain to memory.  For example, “what color shirt was he wearing?”  Instead, I encourage people to ask implicit questions, which are open-ended, and to which there is not necessarily a right or wrong answer, but by which you can still determine how well the child understood.  For example, rather than asking what color shirt the character wore, in its place ask “Why was it important that the character wore a blue shirt?”  This causes the child to think in a deeper manner, without having to memorize the color of the shirt, yet you still yield rich insights pertaining to how well the child is comprehending.
6. Determine importance
When you were in high school or college, did you ever have a textbook that turned a fluorescent color because you couldn’t figure out which passages were important, so you just used a highlighter to highlight the entire text?!  This is a common scenario to which most of us can relate.  Sometimes, whether it is a text, or some other aspect of life, we have a hard time determining what is important.  It often has to do with the difficulty level of the content, and how familiar we are with it.  When a subject is overwhelming, confusing, and foreign, it is much harder to determine what is important, than when we are dealing with familiar territory, which is at a comfortable difficulty level for us.
Practice determining importance with your child.  Explicitly model how you determine what is important.  Show your child how you might look in topic sentences, or at bullet points, titles, or headings to make more sense of a passage.  Practice highlighting a passage together.  Once children know how to extract important information, they can study better, focus better, and provide adequate retellings and/or summaries.
7.  Synthesize
Once children can determine importance, they can begin to synthesize.  The easiest way I can think of to explain synthesis to my students is to use a weaving metaphor.  When we synthesize, we have to take information from different sources, and weave it all together for ourselves.  This is no easy task!  Imagine a weaver who has to select the best spools of thread, based on her knowledge of thread.  Then, she must weave the threads together into one coherent, beautiful piece.  That is precisely what successful readers do when they comprehend.  They weave the information, or synthesize it.  I would suggest putting important facts from a book onto long strips of paper, which could represent threads.  Then, think through how you would weave those important facts together, and you could even physically manipulate the papers until you have your own quilt.  This activity helps a lot when children have to write research papers, or other written responses to text.
8.  Fix-Up Strategies
Last but not least, simply equip your child to have fix-up strategies at his/her fingertips upon which he/she can rely when information breaks down.  When you are reading, won’t you stop and re-read something when you know it’s no longer making sense?  Well, lots of children won’t do that.  They won’t stop!  They just keep going!  Together with your child, brainstorm and make a list of fix-up strategies.  The list could be as simple as “stop, go back, re-read, use a highlighter, predict, ask questions, etc.”  It doesn’t have to be anything fancy.  The two keys are that your child first recognizes when his/her comprehension breaks down, and second, knows a few things he/she can do to help mend that comprehension.
Having explicit strategies at our fingertips is the secret to success when it comes to comprehension!
For more information, I would highly recommend the book Strategies that Work by Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis.  It is the best book on the market about comprehension, and it is the source of much of the information I condensed for you into this brief article.�

Why My Child is Not Comprehending What They’re Reading - Treasuring the Moments
August 1, 2012

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Reading With Your Child

Reading With Your Child

www.rif.org › Home › Literacy Resources › Articles › Reading Aloud

Start Young and Stay With It

At just a few months of age, an infant can look at pictures, listen to your voice, and point to objects on cardboard pages. Guide your child by pointing to the pictures, and say the names of the various objects. By drawing attention to pictures and associating words with both pictures and real-world objects, your child will learn the importance of language.

Children learn to love the sound of language before they even notice the existence of printed words on a page. Reading books aloud to children stimulates their imagination and expands their understanding of the world. It helps them develop language and listening skills and prepares them to understand the written word. When the rhythm and melody of language become a part of a child's life, learning to read will be as natural as learning to walk and talk.

Even after children learn to read by themselves, it's still important for you to read aloud together. By reading stories that are on their interest level, but beyond their reading level, you can stretch young readers' understanding and motivate them to improve their skills.

It's Part of Life

Although the life of a parent is often hectic, you should try to read with your child at least once a day at a regularly scheduled time. But don't be discouraged if you skip a day or don't always keep to your schedule. Just read to your child as often as you possibly can.
If you have more than one child, try to spend some time reading alone with each child, especially if they're more than 2 years apart. However, it's also fine to read to children at different stages and ages at the same time. Most children enjoy listening to many types of stories. When stories are complex, children can still get the idea and can be encouraged to ask questions. When stories are easy or familiar, youngsters enjoy these "old friends" and may even help in the reading.
Taking the time to read with your children on a regular basis sends an important message: Reading is worthwhile.

One More Time

You may go through a period when your child favors one book and wants it read night after night. It is not unusual for children to favor a particular story, and this can be boring for parents. Keep in mind, however, that a favorite story may speak to your child's interests or emotional needs. Be patient. Continue to expose your children to a wealth of books and eventually they will be ready for more stories.

Talking About Stories

It's often a good idea to talk about a story you're reading, but you needn't feel compelled to talk about every story. Good stories will encourage a love for reading, with or without conversation. And sometimes children need time to think about stories they've read. A day or so later, don't be surprised if your child mentions something from a story you've read together.

Remember When You Were Very Young

It will help to consider some things adult readers tend to take for granted. It's easier to be patient with children when we remember how much they don't know. Here are a few concepts we adults know so well that we forget sometimes we ever had to learn them:

• There's a difference between words and pictures. Point to the print as you read aloud.
• Words on a page have meaning, and that is what we learn to read.
• Words go across the page from left to right. Follow with your finger as you read.
• Words on a page are made up of letters and are separated by a space.
• Each letter has at least two forms: one for capital letters and and one for small letters.

Imagine how you would feel if you were trying to interpret a book full of such symbols. That's how young readers feel. But, a little patience (maybe by turning it into a puzzle you can solve together) is certain to build confidence.

Advertise the Joy of Reading!

Our goal is to motivate children to read so they will practice reading independently and become fluent readers. That happens when children enjoy reading. We parents can do for reading what fast food chains do for hamburgers...ADVERTISE! And we advertise by reading great stories and poems to children.
We can help our children find the tools they need to succeed in life. Having access to information through the printed word is an absolute necessity. Knowledge is power, and books are full of it. But reading is more than just a practical tool. Through books we can enrich our minds; we can also relax and enjoy some precious leisure moments.
With your help, as your children begin a lifelong relationship with the printed word, they can grow into adults who read easily and frequently whether for business, knowledge, or pleasure.
Authors: Bernice Cullinan and Brod Bagert.
Source: U.S. Department of Education.

RELATED ARTICLES

• Reading Aloud to Your Child: The Loving, Personal Gift

• Read Aloud in Any Language

• Facts About Reading Aloud

THE NATURE OF READING

Definitions of Reading

Among the many definitions of reading that have arisen in recent decades, three prominent ideas emerge as most critical for understanding what "learning to read" means:

• Reading is a process undertaken to reduce uncertainty about meanings a text conveys.
• The process results from a negotiation of meaning between the text and its reader.
• The knowledge, expectations, and strategies a reader uses to uncover textual meaning all play decisive roles way the reader negotiates with the text's meaning.

Reading does not draw on one kind of cognitive skill, nor does it have a straightforward outcome—most texts are understood in different ways by different readers.

Background Knowledge

For foreign language learners to read, they have to be prepared to use various abilities and strategies they already possess from their reading experiences in their native language. They will need the knowledge they possess to help orient themselves in the many dimensions of language implicated in any text. Researchers have established that the act of reading is a non-linear process that is recursive and context-dependent. Readers tend to jump ahead or go back to different segments of the text, depending on what they are reading to find out.

Goals

Asking a learner to "read" a text requires that teachers specify a reading goal. One minimal goal is to ask the learner to find particular grammatical constructions or to identify words that relate to particular features or topics of the reading.  But such goals are always only partial. For example, a text also reveals a lot about the readers for which it is written and a lot about subject matter that foreign language learners may or may not know or anticipate.

A Holistic Approach to Reading

The curriculum described here is called a holistic curriculum, following Miller (1996). Holistic education is concerned with connections in human experience—connections between mind and body, between linear thinking and intuitive ways of knowing, between academic disciplines, between the individual and the community.
A holistic curriculum emphasizes how the parts of a whole relate to each other to form the whole. From this perspective, reading relates to speaking, writing, listening comprehension, and culture.

Pedagogical Stages of Reading

Ideally, each text used in such a curriculum should be pedagogically staged so that learners approach it by moving from pre-reading, through initial reading, and into rereading. This sequence carefully moves the learner from comprehension tasks to production tasks. In addition, these tasks should build upon each other in terms of increasing cognitive difficulty.

• Pre-Reading: The initial levels of learning, as described in Bloom's Taxonomy, involve recognizing and comprehending features of a text. As proposed here, pre-reading tasks involve speaking, reading, and listening.
• Initial Reading: Initial reading tasks orient the learner to the text and activate the cognitive resources that are associated with the learner's own expectations. For example, discussions of genres and stereotypes may help the learner to identify potential reading difficulties and to strategize ways to overcome these challenges. Simple oral and written reproduction tasks should precede more complex production tasks that call for considering creative thinking about several issues at the same time.
• Rereading: In rereading, the learner is encouraged to engage in active L2 production such as verbal or written analysis and argumentation. These activities require longer and more complex discourse. At this point, the language learners' critical thinking needs to interact with their general knowledge. Ideally, cultural context and the individual foreign language learner's own identity emerge as central to all acts of production. 

• Readability and the Holistic Approach

  Teachers should assess whether the texts they assign are appropriately readable for their students. But how to measure readability? In the holistic approach advocated here, readability is not a static property of a given text. Instead, readability is determined by three characteristics: the suitability of the text for the readers' background, their language, and the instructor's curricular goals.
  In general, a text is more readable when:
  
• it presents concrete issues rather than abstract ones
• it provides the "who," "what," "where," and "when" familiar to the reader
• it is age-appropriate
• it is in a genre familiar to the reader
• it is acceptable to the reader's cultural background
• it is longer, with context clues, or it is a short text on a familiar topic

TIPS : READING EFFICIENTLY

For most people, it is easy to learn to read faster. Your reading rate is often just a matter of habit. But to begin, you may need to try to change some habits and try these tips:
1. Pay attention when you read and read as if it really matters. Most people read in the same way that they watch television, i.e. in an inattentive, passive way. Reading takes effort and you must make the effort. A wise teacher once told me that you can learn anything if you do three things:
PAY ATTENTION
PAY ATTENTION and
PAY ATTENTION.
There are some simple methods that you can use to pay better attention and get more out of your textbook reading time. Different authors call it different things, but many researchers say that you will improve your comprehension if you somehow "preview" the passage before you actually sit down and read every word.
To do a preview you:

• take 30 to 60 seconds.
• look over the title of the chapter.
• look at all the headings, subheadings and marked, italic or dark print.
• look at any pictures or illustrations, charts or graphs.
• quickly skim over the passage, reading the first and last paragraph and glancing at the first sentence of every other paragraph.
• close the book and ask yourself:
• ---What is the main idea?
• ---What kind of writing is it?
• ---What is the author's purpose?

You might not think that you could possibly answer these questions with so little exposure to the material, but if you do the preview correctly, you should have some very good general ideas. If you have a general idea of what the passage is about before you really read it, you will be able to understand and remember the passage better. When you finally get to the point where you are actually slowly reading the passage, read in a "questioning" manner -as if you were seaching for something. It sometimes helps if you take the heading or title of a chapter and turn it into a question.
For example, if the heading of a section in the text is "The Causes of the Civil War", take that title and switch it into a question like: "What are the causes of the Civil War?". Now you have a goal; something to look for; something to find out. When you are goal-oriented, you are more likely to reach the goal. At least you'll remember one thing about the text which you have just read.
2. Stop talking to yourself when you read. People talk to themselves in 2 ways, by:

• vocalizing, which is the actual moving of your lips as you read, and
• subvocalizing, which is talking to yourself in your head as you silently read.

Both of these will slow you down to the point in which you find that you can't read any faster than you can speak. Speech is a relatively slow activity; for most, the average speed is about 250 WPM (words per minute).
Reading should be an activity which involves only the eyes and the brain. Vocalization ties reading to actual speaking. Try to think of reading as if you were looking at a landscape, a panorama of ideas, rather than looking at the rocks at your feet.
3. Read in thought groups. Studies have shown that when we read, our eyes must make small stops along the line. Poor readers make many, many more fixations (eyestops) than good readers. Not only does this slow you down, but it inhibits comprehension because meaning is easier to pull from groups of words rather than from individual words or even single letters. Try to read in phrases of three or four words, especially in complete clauses and prepositional phrases. Your mind may internalize them as if the whole phrase is like one big meaning-rich word.
4. Don't keep re-reading the same phrases. Poor readers habitually read and re-read the same phrase over and over again. This habit of making "regressions" doubles or triples reading time and often does not result in better comprehension. A single careful, attentive reading may not be enough for full comprehension, but is often more effective than constant regressions in the middle of a reading. It is best to work on paying closer attention the first time through. Do a preview first before the careful reading and try the tips I mentioned above. You'll remember better without the rereading.
5. Vary your reading rate to suit the difficulty and type of writing of the text. Poor readers always read at the same slow rate. An efficient reader speeds up for easier material and slows down for the hard. Some things were not meant to be read quickly at all. Legal material and very difficult text should be read slowly. Easier material and magazines and newspapers can be read quickly. Poetry and plays were meant to be performed, and if not acted out, then at least, spoken out loud orally. This obviously will conflict with good speed reading method which forbids vocalization. Religious writings and scripture were originally written to be recited and listened to by an audience which was likely to be intelligent, but illiterate. The "fun" of poetry, plays, or prayer is not really experienced if you "speed read" the text.

Teaching reading to young learners

The Russian traditional methodology for teaching reading in English is to teach how different letters are pronounced in different positions and combinations, a method similar to phonics. The phonemic alphabet is usually taught alongside with letters. Russian students have been taught this way for ages, and could read relatively well (I'm speaking about the technical aspect of reading, not comprehension).The problems with this approach are the following:1) Students tend to confuse letters and phonemic symbols.2) They have two similar reading systems to internalize at the same time.3) There are lots of letter combinations in English, more or less common, and it's time-consuming to cover all of them.4) There also exceptions, especially in the most common words.5) The approach is 100% deductive, which may be inappropriate for young learners whose logic is still developing.After the country became open to the world, teachers learnt about other methods. Many foreign textbooks in which whole-word reading was taught appeared. Many teachers were not satisfied with the outcome of such teaching. The result was worse than in the previous case. Of course, our brain learns to recognize patterns, but that requires a great amount of exposure, which is not possible in EFL situation.The most effective I find the combination of phonics and whole-word reading.First I teach the most common "sight words" or "Dolch words" as whole words. We play games with word cards, students do exercises. This way they get used to letters, the shape and sound of words.Then the phonics stage comes. Students start to analyze word structure and transfer the experience onto other words. Here drills and simple readers really help. But wordcards are not abandoned at this stage, we continue to play and work with them

How To Teach Young Learners: One Step At A Time

Young learners, those attending preschool and kindergarten, will not have any personal reason for studying English.
It is simply another subject that they have to study at school or that their parents have told them they need to learn. At this point in their lives, they may not know or comprehend how important these classes can be. They might view your classes as simply another fun daily activity and that is just fine. Even at this early age, you can encourage them to develop an interest in learning English which will stay with them long after they have finished your classes.

How To Understand And Teach Young Learners Better

1. 1
   What Young Learners Want
   Students at this level are just starting their academic careers. School may be intimidating for some of the students in your class so, in order to encourage everyone to participate, it is important to make your lessons relaxed and fun. YL Students will be learning very basic material but you can design creative lessons that get students moving around and speaking with one another. Young learners are generally very enthusiastic about songs, especially if they can sing along, and active games. Be sure to provide lots of encouragement and positive feedback. You want to create a safe, stress-free environment that everyone can enjoy learning in.
   
2. 2
   How Young Learners Behave
   Keep exercises fun and short because these students have short attention spans and are easily distracted. Overacting and projection will help keep the focus on you. Teach students how to behave in a classroom by asking them to be quiet while you are talking and raise their hands if they have questions or want to answer a question. This may not be directly related to ESL but it is important that students learn good behavior early on; it will make their transition to primary school easier. Teach them to respond to basic classroom English phrases such as “Please sit down.” because these are expressions that they will hear repeatedly throughout their study of English. For students at this age, you are responsible not only for starting to teach them English, but also for preparing them for their next level of education. Students will perform better in their classes if they behave well and have a good understanding of basic principles.
   
3. 3
   What To Focus On
   The primary focus of these lessons will be on communication and laying a solid foundation for further English coursework. Students should practice the different sounds of the English language and learn material such as the alphabet, numbers, colors and shapes. You will introduce vocabulary words gradually and may choose to study some simple structures that relate to everyday life too. It could be that reading and writing never enter into your classes but a focus on speaking and listening will help students become more comfortable and confident with English.
   
4. 4
   More YL Tips
   There are many other things you can do to ensure that students succeed in class. There is no need to assign homework at this stage but be sure to track individual and class progress so that students can visually see what they have learned and how they are doing. Encourage students to try their best and create a constructive learning environment where students do not need to worry about making mistakes. Create activities and exercises that are entertaining. Help students learn how to interact with one another as well as how to speak English. Students will also feel more comfortable if you stick to a regular schedule so if you decide to make changes, implement them over a period of time rather than all at once. Constantly review and avoid introducing too much new vocabulary at a time. Students may not remember material from one day to the next so repetition is important. The more students are exposed to certain material, the faster they will learn it. This is how native speakers learn English, by listening to people around them and expanding their range of vocabulary gradually.
   

These learners can be a real pleasure to teach because they do not feel stressed by their studies and approach everything with youthful innocence.

You play an important role in helping them develop into lifelong learners. Foster a love of learning by creating lesson plans that appeal to them, suit their maturity level, and focus on what will help them excel in future English courses.

English Reading with Young Learners

Reading with very young learners often demands a different approach to reading with older learners. For one thing young learners may not yet be able to read well in their own language‏‎ so dealing with a different language (and possibly a different alphabet‏‎) may bring up extra difficulties.
Another issue is concentration. Young learners have much shorter attention spans than older learners so keep things simple and keep them short.
This article offers a few tips and ideas when dealing with reading and young learners. In no particular order:

• Make sure the material you are reading is of the right level and age group! This cannot be overstated: it should not be too difficult or too simple; it should be the right age group also and not be too "childish" or "grown up" for the group in question. In this regard it should be the same kind of material as the students would read in their own language.
• Encourage sound effects. When a character in the story rings the doorbell see how many different doorbells the class can give you!
• Read clearly and carefully. Make it as interesting as possible by not keeping your eyes on the book but engaging in eye contact with different students as you read. Keep things exciting!
• Try stopping in mid sentence and see if the students can guess what comes next. Unlike older students and adults who mostly want new material when they read, younger learners can enjoy reading the same book more than once and getting to know it well.
• Get the class to act out small scenes from the book.
• Use silly voices!
• Try making obvious mistakes: "Red Riding Hood went to see her teacher!" Stop and looked surprised. "Her teacher?! I don't think so! Who did she go and see?"
• Make sure you ask both open-ended questions‏‎ as well as Yes/No questions.
• If the class are learning how to read, make sure to point out useful letters - the first letter of the character's name, for example.
• Don't be too didactic; try and make reading a pleasure.

One major point we'd suggest is to keep thing playful as well. Reading should be fun and enjoyable and the more you can make it so the more the class will enjoy doing it. How you present material now will make a huge difference not just for the lesson you are giving but potentially for the rest of your students' lives!