Page 92 - Teaching English at Primary Level: From Theory into the Classroom

Developing Literacy

Look-Say-Cover Write Check Try again

THE EARTH

THE SUN

THE MOON

THE STARS
Images by brgfx/Freepik
Figure 5.2 Activity Example ‘Look-Say-Cover-Write-Check’

high-frequency words (e.g. the, of, said, who) which the pupils are encour-
aged to learn by recognizing their form, length and letter combinations (Da-
garin Fojkar et al., 2011).
The whole-word approach has been recognized as efficient for beginner
readers and with limited amounts of words, but it was also shown that chil-
dren foundit hardto generaliseandfindpatternsin thewordsbeinglearnt or
read unknown words. An example of the whole word approach is the activity
in which pupils label things in the classroom by writing the words on pieces
of paper and putting them to the matching places or labelling a picture (e.g.
body parts on a picture of a body). Another common whole word approach
activityis‘Look-say-cover-write-check’(Figure5.2),wherelearnerslook at the
pictures and words (or only word cards), cover them, try to write them on
their own and then check their spelling by looking at the cards again.

Language Experience Approach (LEA)
Thelanguageexperienceapproach startsat thesentencelevelandpromotes
readingandwritingthrough theuseofpersonalexperiencesandspoken lan-
guage. When using this approach, learners and their teacher create a text to-
gether.Thiscan beasummaryofastory,aletter,anote,etc.ShinandCrandall
(2019, p. 198) suggest these steps in creating the text:
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