How Can literacy skills be developed in young English learners?
The field of English Teaching to young learners has undergone important transformations in the last decades. In the specific context of Latin America, traditional classroom practices relegated English learning to filling up worksheets, learning basic shapes and colors, singing the alphabet, and more worksheets. Multiple research in brain development, language acquisition, and the highlight of 21st-century skills has brought a shift to those traditional teaching paradigms.
From my experience, literacy skills can be developed in young English learners. Kang (n.d) suggests 5 ways to achieve this:
1- Immerse students in print and literature. Make sure students are exposed to a variety of printed resources, including real-life texts (recipes, stories, informational texts, menus, instructions for board games, etc). Reflect with your young learners that they can find print anywhere around them and the reasons why people read.
2- Utilize and build students' background knowledge. Students' background knowledge and experiences are key to help them build their own understanding of the world. This will not only help them achieve their Zone of Proximal Development, but it will help also help them make connections with the content and develop more confidence when using the language.
3- Model and teach various reading and writing strategies. Read aloud, shared readings, modeled and interactive writings are some strategies English teachers can incorporate in their practice to foster reading and writing behaviors.
4- Build vocabulary and automaticity of high-frequency words. There are plenty of class games, routines, and strategies teachers can use to help students increase their vocabulary and high-frequency words. Kang (n.d) explains: "Automatic recognition of these words and content-area vocabulary instruction will help children comprehend and create text more fluently".
5- Give explicit instruction in phonics. On this matter, Kang (n.d) reminds us that "English has 26 letters representing 44 sounds with more than 500 ways to spell them, so even native speakers of English need explicit instruction to handle decoding English. The specific kind of phonics instruction and amount of time spent on it may differ depending on the writing system and literacy practices of the L1".
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