Page 99 - Teaching English at Primary Level: From Theory into the Classroom

Reading

Reading Activities and Strategies
Dagarin Fojkar et al. (2011, pp. 20–21) distinguish between activities at the
pre-literacy stage and activities at the word level for YLs. For the pre-literacy
stage, they suggest carrying out games which help learners connect sounds
with objects (e.g. showing them a set of items starting with the letter ‘b’: ball,
book, bird) and a variety of tactile activities which enhance vocabulary reten-
tion, such as cutting out letters or whole words from different materials and
gluing them on paper, using the jigsaw sponge mat, magnetic letters, mak-
ing shapes or letters in sand, different types of puzzles, and many others.
Shared reading also has a positive effect on the development of reading
skills. The teacher usually reads a big book that everyone can see, and he/she
reads it alone or with the help of the learners, depending on their level. Dur-
ing the reading, they discuss the contents of the book, the illustrations etc.
While reading with the teacher, learners also see the common sound-letter
combinations in the book and acquire different reading strategies.
Word level activities consist of both:
techniques for recognizing whole words
and techniques for making connections
between letters and sounds. A number
of games can be used for developing
reading at the word level, such as mem-
ory matching of words and pictures,
bingo, dominoes, word puzzles and oth-
ers.
Most activities at the early stage will
be focusedonwordlevel readingand
developing reading beyond word level
should be done gradually. Some exam-
ples of activities which are focused on
phrases or sentences are: chopping up
sentences and getting the pupils to put
them back together, mixing parts of
songs and rhymes and asking the learn-
ers to reconstruct them, various gap-fill
Figure 6.1 Reading and Drawing Task
activities, etc. Pinter (2006) also points
out that developing reading in the YLs
classroomisaholisticprocess,includingsubskillssuchaspredicting,noticing
patterns and guessing and it should include different senses, i.e. multisen-

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