Methods of Teaching Reading

Like other language skills, reading is also a complex skill involving number of simultaneous operations. The process of reading may be divided into three stages. The first stage may be called the “recognition stage” where the learner recognises a word or group of words. Difficulty at this stage will largely depend upon the difference between the script of the learner’s mother tongue and English. Again, the learner whose mother tongue orthography is marked by one-to-one correspondence between the sounds and the letters will try to adopt his/her mother tongue reading strategy of spelling pronunciation in reading English and will find very difficult. The second stage may be called the “structuring stage” where the learner sees the syntactic relationships. The third stage is called “Interpretation Stage” where the learner comprehends the significance of a word, phrase and sentence.

The above discussion gives a look into the problems of teaching reading. Reading poems, stories and small English kids jokes will help you improve your kids reading skill. Find below various methods of teaching reading below;

The Alphabet Method: This is an age old method. In this method, the emphasis is on learning the “names” of the letters of the alphabet in their sequential order A, B, C, D…. etc. (This is outdated.)

The Phonic or Syllabic Method: In this method, the emphasis is not on the names of the letters but on the sounds each of them represents.

The Whole-word Method: In this method the learner is taught to read each word as word as a word-picture, without attention to individual letters. This helps learners to avoid incorrect spelling-pronunciation.

The Sentence Method: This method is somewhat similar to “The whole-word Method” except that here the minimum teaching unit is the sentence and not the word.

The Story Method: This method may also be regarded as an extension of the sentence method. Here the teacher tells the class a short story to create a verbal context and then presents (on blackboard) sentences connected with the story. Since the context is known, the pupils do not have much difficulty in identifying the sentences.

From the above methods, it is clear that there is no single method to of teaching reading which is suitable for all classes and learners. Depending upon a particular circumstance and group of pupils the teacher has to use judicious combinations of all the above methods.