Supporting Emergent Readers and ELLs

Last year I began giving private English lessons to a five year old who had very little exposure to reading or speaking in English. He had great success with identifying common words in isolation, but his ability to recall letters, their sounds, and read with accurate pronunciation was hampered. It was mainly because of his lack of phonemic and phonological awareness with the English alphabet. In order to help him improve his second language abilities, I began by assisting him with recognizing each letter of the alphabet and the corresponding sounds.

I found this blog with a free printable to assess students with letter and sound recognition. As he took part in the documenting of his progress, he became more motivated and interested in his improvements.

In addition to administering this quick assessment every two weeks, I had him read short picture books with me on a regular basis. Picture books with repetition are useful for young readers due to the frequency of common words and phrases. Additionally picture books foster the practice of predicting text and the developing story.

After two months, I began to pinpoint the letters with which he continued to struggle remembering and began working on lessons reinforcing them. There are many resources online for activities teaching individual letters, their sounds, and the placement of those letters in high frequency words.

Once he was successful with identifying the letters and their sounds, we began working on vowel digraphs. We had been reading a book with the oa digraph, so I made this homemade digraph strip to go along with our lesson. After you make the letter strips, you only have to change the sticky notes to match the digraph of your choice. Research shows that people who struggle with reading and those with dyslexia are more successful as a reader when taught these initial strategies. A friend of mine, who happens to be a dyslexia specialist, shared this interesting article with me recently.