1. Teaching Reading: Bringing Different Approaches Together
Svetlana Bogolepova
Moscow Pedagogical State University
“Intellect-Service” secondary school

2. The Phonics Approach The Russian Approach
aims to develop and consolidate children’s phonological, phonemic and morphological awareness;
teachers initial sounds, sound blends, consonant and vowel combinations;
teaches explicitly;
is systematically organized and sequenced.
The Russian Approach
teaches the technical side of reading, not paying much attention to meaning;
teaches vowels in different positions in a word, sound of letter combinations;
teaches explicitly.

3. Think and Share!
Children will find it more natural to start with sounds and learn which letters make them, since they are moving from experience with the spoken language to the new worlds of written letters and words.
Mc Guiness (1997) in Cameron, 2001, p. 149
Is it always applicable to your EFL classroom?

4. The Look-and-Say /Linguistic/Whole-Word Approach
focuses on whole-word recognition of most common words;
emphasizes building up a sight vocabulary based on most common words;
develops lexical knowledge (collocations);
students are not explicitly taught that there is a relationship between words and sounds.

5. The Multi-Sensory Approach
uses all senses: visual, auditory, kinesthetic, tactile.
Language Experience
expects child to learn reading as naturally as speech;
child’s oral language is basis for oral instruction;
children learn by reading and rereading books with the teacher’s guidance.

6. What are the limitations of each approach?
Phonics and the Russian Approach:
not much experience with spoken language;
purely deductive: little development involved (top-down approach);
not all the words correspond to rules;
child’s logic is not developed enough.

7. What are the limitations of each approach?
Whole-Word and Language Experience:
mostly cares for visual learners;
child can work out patterns wrongly;
takes different time for an individual child to remember a word (combination);
doesn’t satisfy the needs of analytical students;
limited exposure to the language.

8. Why not bring them together?

9. Activities to Teach Reading the Phonics Way
reading drills
worksheets and simple readers (
songs and chants:
video lessons
word cards with sound blends highlighted in colour.

10. Activities to Teach Reading the Phonics Way
Games:
I Spy
Miss Bell’s bag
match the word to the sound
all in a row
circle the words with a particular sound.
Phonological Awareness:
- clap if you hear a certain sound;
if you hear a long vowel, clap twice/raise two hands, if you hear a short vowel, clap once/raise one hand;
rhyme a word.

11. Whole-Word Reading notice board and words (phrases) of the week (day)
matching
sorting
Fishing
threasure hunt
Bingo and dominoes
word searches and crossword puzzles
guess the word
collecting competition
memory games
intensive and extensive reading.

12. Multi-Sensory Activities
sand letters;
letters/letter combinations from dough;
miming;
echo;
tracing ;
letter mazes ;
choral reading.

13. My experience. teach the alphabet;
teach a number of words as whole-words;
teach the phonemic alphabet;
teach phonics.
What way of teaching reading works for your students? What games and activities do you find useful?
Share your experience, please!

14. References. http://www.balancedreading.com/assessment/abecedarian.pdf
Cameron L. Teaching Languages to Young Learners, 1991
Никитенко З.И. Специфика обучения английскому языку в начальной школе, 2010