Basic Skills
Teach letters. Teaching the fundamentals of letters (what a letter is, what each letter is called, and how it sounds) is where you should begin if you want to teach literacy effectively. Regardless of age level or language, literacy must begin with an understanding of letters. If you are teaching a language with a non-roman alphabet, the same principle applies: teach the characters first.
- Teach your students how to recognize the different shapes of the letters. They will need to be able to easily differentiate between letter which look the same or letters which sound the same.
- Size variation is an important part of learning to write letters. Teach your students about capital letters and lowercase letters and when to use them. If teaching a non-roman alphabet, this will be less of a problem.
- Directionality is another important skill. Your students will need to know what direction letters face and how to properly place them next to each other. For roman lettering, this will be right to left and horizontal. For other languages it can also be left to right or vertical, depending on the region.
- Spacing is an important skill as well. Teach your students how to place space in between words, sentences, paragraphs, etc.
Teach phonics. Phonics is all about learning what sound letters make, how to identify those sounds, and how to work with them. Developing your students’ understanding of phonics will be key to teaching them to read and write.
- Teach your students to hear. They need to be able to listen to speech and recognize that those words are composed of individual sounds.
- Once they grasp the concept of those sounds, teach them to identify the sounds. For example, your students will need to be able to hear an “aaaaahhhh” sound and know that it is written with an “a”.
- Once they are comfortable identifying sounds, you will also need to teach them how to manipulate sounds within words. They should be able to recognize when words rhyme or when one word out of a set begins or ends with a different sound than the others. They should be able to think of their own examples as well.
- Teach compound sounds as well. You will need to explain that when certain letters appear together, it changes how they sound. For example, in English the “th” or “sh”, in Spanish the “ll”, and in German the “ch” or “eu”.
Teach the forming of words. Once your students have a solid grasp on letters and their associated sounds, you can move on to using those letters and sounds to form words. Read to them frequently at this stage, as well as writing lots of examples for them to look at. This will give them opportunities to see how words are formed. An important part of teaching word formation is teaching your students the difference between vowels and consonants. Teach them which letters are which and explain the necessity of vowels within a word. Teach the basic principles regarding where in a word vowels can go. For example, it is very rare for the only vowel in a word to go at the very end of the word but quite common to have the second letter or sound of a word be a vowel.
Understand sentence structure. You students will need to learn and understand sentence structure once they have mastered forming words. Sentence structure is the order in which words or parts of speech go, the sequences in which they are used. Understanding sentence structure will be necessary if they are to form written sentences which sound correct. Often people will have difficulty writing naturally like this, even if they speak correctly.
- Your students should learn how to identify nouns. Teach them what a noun is and where it usually goes in a sentence. The easiest way to explain it will likely be the tried-and-true “person, place, thing or idea”.
- Your students will need to be able to identify verbs, too. Teach them about “action words” and give them lots of examples. You can have them act out different verbs in order to solidify the concept in their mind. Explain where verbs go in a sentence.
- Your students will need to be able to identify adjectives as well. Explain that adjectives describe other words. Teach them where these words go in a sentence and how they attach to other words
Teach proper grammar. Teaching proper grammar will be absolutely essential to your students’ learning to write sentences which can be understood and sound natural.
- Using parts of speech together is an important concept in grammar. Your students should develop an understanding of how nouns, verbs and adjectives interact and how they fit together. Where these words go in a sentence and when they must be preceded or followed by another is also important to understand.
- Tense is a key concept to understanding how to form proper sentences. Your students should learn and practice creating sentences which take place in the past, present, and future. This will teach them how words must be changed in order to indicate time. This is a complex skill and is often not truly mastered until much later.
- Conjugation and declension are other important skills. Conjugation is how verbs change, depending on how they interact with the other words in the sentence. For example, in English we say “I jump” but we also say “she jumped”. Nouns can go through a similar process, called declension, but it is nonexistent in English.
- Though it has largely been removed from English, many other languages have case systems which your students will need to understand if they are learning one of those languages. Cases denote the different functions that nouns and pronouns can serve in a sentence and, at least in those languages with a case system, how the case changes the noun (generally with a shift in suffix).
.jpg)
