Teaching Strategies

Reading Aloud involves the teacher reading aloud a text and demonstrating a positive attitude to
reading, reading behaviour and book orientation. Students are provided with opportunities to enjoy a
variety of texts and to engage with the text afterwards through activities, such as discussion and
mime.
Storytelling involves the teacher telling a story with the use of pictures or real objects, e.g. puppets or
storyboards, to support the students understanding of the content. Students are provided with
opportunities to participate in the story and develop some listening and basic reading skills. After
Storytelling activities can include retelling the story or role-play.
Shared Reading involves teachers modelling, instructing and explaining reading skills and strategies
through sharing the reading process with students. They read and reread the text, e.g. a big book or
picture book, involving the students more and more with the reading. Students are provided with
opportunities to learn and develop the skills, strategies and confidence needed to participate in Guided
and Independent Reading as well as the Home Reading Programme. They complete After Reading
activities either as a whole class, in groups or individually.
Guided Reading involves teachers working with individual students or small groups of students with
similar learning needs. Teachers provide opportunities for students to practise effective strategies they
have been taught in Shared Reading sessions. Students read books at their Instructional Reading
Level (Section 8).
Independent Reading involves teachers providing uninterrupted time for students to practise and
integrate skills and strategies they have learned in Shared and Guided Reading sessions as well as
enjoy the reading experience. The students read books at their Independent Reading Level
Home Reading involves teachers selecting books to be read at home with the guidance and
encouragement of parents or guardians. The students will practise the strategies and skills they have
learned during Shared and Guided Reading. The letter books revisit and consolidate the sounds taught
in class while the small books revisit and consolidate the taught language structures.
Reading Skills
The reading skills are:
Understanding the basic conventions of written English
Constructing meaning from texts
Locating information and ideas.
In the process of developing reading skills, learners from an early stage acquire, develop and apply:
knowledge of the use of written symbols
knowledge of letter-sound relationships
skills of word recognition
grammar knowledge
skills in contextual understanding.

Reading Strategies
These are:
Semantic strategies finding out about meanings, e.g. word meanings, common expressions, picture
cues
Syntactic strategies finding out about language structures, e.g. sentence structure, word order, text
organisation
Graphophonic strategies finding out about:
the sounds of language, e.g. rhyme, alliteration, onset and rime, individual sounds
the relationships between sounds and letters and about combining sounds (blending), e.g.
differences between letter sounds and letter names, alphabetic principle, analogy and letter clusters
language in print, e.g. letter and word shapes, letter clusters, sight words, punctuation, layout
Vocabulary
Vocabulary development refers to the development of knowledge of stored information about the
meanings and pronunciations of words necessary for communication. It is important for emergent
reading because when a student comes to a word and sounds it out, he/she is also determining if the
word makes sense based on his/her understanding of the word. If a student does not know the
meaning of the word, there is no way to check if the word fits, or to make meaning from the sentence.
When formal reading instruction begins, a limited vocabulary may impede the students ability to read
fluently with meaning. Language learning experiences, which are purposeful, meaningful, challenging,
contextually rich and age appropriate should be developed to build the English vocabularies of
students.