Page 89 - Teaching English at Primary Level: From Theory into the Classroom

Literacy Approaches

strategies that are specific to developing literacy in English. Dagarin Fojkar et
al. (2011) point out that one of the main problems for learners who are learn-
ing to read and write in English is poor correspondence between sounds and
letters. In English there are 44 sounds and 26 letters which can be written in
2501 different ways. Some of the examples of the spelling irregularities are:
somelettersorlettercombinationsarepronouncedin different ways(e.g.let-
ter ‘c’ can be pronounced as /k/ in ‘cat’ or /s/ in ‘pronunciation’), some letters
are silent (e.g. knee), there are diphthongs (e.g. /ei/, /ai/), etc.
Due to the poor matching between letters and sounds, there are usually
different ideas as to how literacy should be taught. Two main approaches
have been the subject of heated discussions since the 19th century, the phon-
ics and the whole-word approach. Phonics-based literacy teaching uses letter
combinations and syllables in a word in order to decode language, while in
the whole-word approach children are taught to read and write by recogniz-
ing words as whole pieces of language (see below).

Literacy Approaches
Reviewing different approaches to literacy development, Cameron (2001) ar-
gues that they differ in terms of the level of language which they start from:
the text, the sentence, the word or the letter level. Each of these levels is re-
lated to a different approach to literacy learning both in L1 and FL. The emer-
gent literacy and the genre approach are both focused on the text level, the
language experience approach starts at sentence level, the whole-word ap-
proach at word level and the phonics approach at the level of sounds.

Emergent Literacy
This approach is based on the understanding that young children do not ac-
quire literacy only through direct instruction but by being exposed to dif-
ferent types of text and reading. In other words, children will ‘work out for
themselves the patterns and regularities that link spoken and written text’
(Cameron, 2001, p. 145.) by listening to different books and stories which are
appropriate for their level. Studies showed that the emergent literacy ap-
proach works well with some children but not all and that it is especially ef-
fective when a lot of individual work is invested by a skilled adult. Neverthe-
less, the idea has had a considerable impact on understanding the role of lit-
eracy, promoting a learner-centred perspective and raising questions about
the quality of books used in classrooms and the importance of children un-
derstanding what they read. Cloud et al. (2009) suggest that emergent liter-
acy activities in school should be meaningful, interesting and interactive so

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