DIANA POTTER sent me this email, which I found most interesting that is why I have posted it here to share with you all.
Have your saying!
Hi Grace,
Just a quick (early morning!) mail from me to ask you if you can do me two huge favours. I am trying to write up an 'internal' paper about the problems faced by second language (Spanish) children beginning to read in English. As I said this is for 'home consumption' to help me and also teachers at school, but I also thought that, once written, it might be usefful as part of your training sessions as it would be a pooling of many brains and differing situations (as they say, all happy families are the same or have similar traits, but all unhappy ones are different ....)
With this in mind, could I ask you to:
1. jot down any 'problems', 'hurdles', 'mountains' or whatever you want to call them SOME children face when learning to read and spell in English?
2. Maybe ask for contributions from other teachers (the ones who attend your courses) to be sent to my mail address .... potter@arnet.com.ar
Thanks and regards,
Diana
Hi Diana!
It looks that both of us are hardworkers.....I am in two things right now, on the one hand I am writing my "paper" about ESSARP Conference to share in school at our Heads meeting on Tuesday and a shorter one to post on the school blog, and on the other hand preparing and adjusting the existent JP presentations for my Uruguay training tour ( I am seeing 4 schools there..this week)
Answering your question:
1. jot down any 'problems', 'hurdles', 'mountains' or whatever you want to call them SOME children face when learning to read and spell in English?
I think that children reproduce what they hear, therefore what they pronounce is what we teach them, i.e. we teach them a sound and they will imitate what we say. Saying this I believe that if they pronounce the letter sound with a spanish hyothesis either the teacher`s pronunciation was a more "spanish" like sound than an English one (which might not be the case in your school) or the teacher didn`t correct the child`s sound right on the spot, just because she didn`t realise in the whole lot response...(this can be a very sound possibility)
If a child gets to produce the wrong sound, it is very difficult afterwards to correct it as it goes into the process of deleting and reseting/relearning it (you know about that a lot!)
There is another issue that bears importance, in that our children are not exposed to the English language as we were exposed when we were in our "English" schools as opposed to our current "bilingual schools". We were surrounded by a natural English environment where all of the teachers were native english speakers, so not only did we hear the real English but all of their accents...we were so very immersed that we just picked it up naturally and accurately. Our children`s reality is not that anymore, they might have %50 of it some of them, and believe me Diana that makes a difference....and that is why we have to be very conscious of it and teach with more accuracy without overdoing pronunciation....It sounds tough doesn`t it? but as long as we are aware, it is not a big deal!
However that is not an excuse for not acquiring correct production of a language but it is a drawback. That is why teachers don`t have to take things for granted when teaching children especially in reading. Teachers schould be very careful, attentive and aware of the right acquisition on the spot, on the moment in order to correct the child. They should be very strict in this point, and spot any child who is not producing the sound correctly (with a spanish hypothesis) The danger of not doing this is, that then the child will not take the correct spelling. He/she will be hearing one sound for a letter that he pronounces differently...he will get into the grey zone of confusion and start coming up with different mispelling and muddling all the sounds similar to the incorrect acquired one...
Another cause for incorrect pronunciation and spelling might be a mixture of child`s capacities and having started late or child`s attention problem. And this is something that needs another encounter as we get into the SEN realm. Sometimes it does not have to do with deep child`s special needs, but just contemporary phonological stage in the child where he can`t still reproduce some specific sounds such as sybilant "s" or fricative "f" or the "r" sound, in this case it is just a matter of a "Fonoaudiologa" treatment help. That is very common with the 5 to 6 year olds in Year 1 or even in Preschool.
The main reason why I brought Jolly Phonics into my school, was that I had a bee in the bonnet about pronunciation and spelling, my pupils were not pronouncing and spelling well in spite of all our efforts! So it wasn`t entirely our fault, but the method used was not working for us driving us to overdo sounds (such the case of "h" as a "jota" in spanish...or sounding the digraph with spanish pronunciation like "ai" as "e i") making it more confusing! With synthetic phonics the children learn the letter sounds correspondences in the most accurate way and individually, so the risk of mispronouncing is minimal. The perfomance at school has changed dramatically since using JP and PI. However, teachers are very careful to spot the children who are not producing the correct sound "on the spot" and they insist on correcting for the proper sound.
In conclusion, I truly believe that teachers should identify right from scratch the children with this problem so as to remediate it immediately by all the strategies we know and have in hand.
Well Diana this is it! You have planted a very interesting query here, and it would be very nice to hear the rest saying about it.
Hope I have anwered your question! And definitely can carry on talking about it and develop it in our next October 20th gathering!
Lots of love and good luck with your paper!
You can ask the teachers in your school why they think some of the children don`t get the right pronunciation and spelling...
Grace
