How to Teach Reading
Teaching someone how to read is an extremely rewarding experience. Whatever you are
teaching your pupil to read their first book or helping a friend to improve their literary skills,
use the following steps and instructions as a helpful teaching guide. The first step is learning to
read is recognizing the letters of alphabet. Go over the letters with the student until he or she
learns them all. Use the alphabet song to help the student to remember.
Once the students know the alphabet in order, challenge him or her by writing several letters
out of order and ask them to recall the letters. You can also name one of the letters and ask the
student to point it out. When teaching a child, start by teaching him or her the letters of their
own name. This makes learning the letters personal and important. Once your student is
familiar with the alphabet, you will need to teach them the sounds of each letter. Learning the
name of the letter is not enough, as a letter may be pronounced differently depending on the
word. Once the student has mastered the sounds of individual letters, they can practice
blending letter sounds together to form words.
This knowledge of the basic sounds of spoken language and their ability to be manipulated to
form different words is known as phonemic awareness.
Go over each letter and teach the sounds that the letter makes. Give examples of words that
start each letter and ask the student to give examples as well.
You can also try stating a word and ask the student which letter it starts with.
Introduce your student to basic reading by showing them two or three letters, one-syllable
words. Beginners tend to do best with words that have a consonant-vowel-consonant pattern,
such as cat or dog. Teaching sight words is very important. Presenting students with
illustrations of sight words along with their print versions helps them to make important
connections between the object and the word.
Flashcards or posters with a colorful picture and the word written under it are excellent sight
words teaching tools. Repetition is a key to sight word acquisition. Beginner readers should be
given the opportunity to read and write a new sight word multiple times. The repetitive reading
of texts featuring certain sight words is one of good strategy for helping students to memorize
the words
Expanding your student’s vocabulary is an integral part of teaching them how to read. The
wider their vocabulary, the more advanced texts they will be able to read and comprehend.
When reading ask your students to underline any words they do not know, then you can
explain or help them look them up the meaning in the dictionary later. In order to test your
student’s progress, you will need to assess their reading comprehension. Typically this can be
done by asking your student to read and answer questions about what they have read. Formats
include multiple choice, short answer, and fill-in-the-blank questions.
You can also assess your student’s knowledge of comprehension strategies by asking them
questions while reading, getting them to give you a summery of what they have just read and
by observing them as they read.