Introduction
Reading and writing are the abilities of a child to acquire knowledge through an extensive process of learning that normally goes on during the entire life and is done unconsciously. However, significant percent of children do not acquire these abilities in spite of going through the same learning processes as their peers and having a normal intellectual capacity in all other aspects (Chamot, 2001).
Strategies and Activities
Question generating is the strategy that encourages children to ask and answer questions after reading. The questions act as reference points that were not understood. In addition, the teacher should be evaluating teaching skills according to what they have learnt.
Inference is another method that involves teaching children to make their own conclusions after reading. This enables them to understand and think critically. This gives them invaluable insight regarding effective reading and writing skills.
Another way to learn children to read and write well is to read to them because pupils should be able to recognize written words accurately and fluently. This is done when the teacher uses a strategy of reading, so they can understand pronunciations.
Taking notes is another strategy for learning reading and writing. Taking notes helps children to remember sections of the readings. Thus, they develop a better understanding of a subject. The notes also help the teacher to monitor their reading and writing progress, which is a reflection of effective teaching skills.
Another method is rereading. By reading once, the text may not be understood well, thus children should reread it until they understand everything quite well.
Sustained silent reading helps to increase reading speed, thus students should be trained on silent reading. This will improve understanding of text including long sentences. Other children, as a form of compensatory strategy, manage to deduce the content of a sentence based on the rest words which the text contains even when individual words are read (Reid, 2000).
Uninterrupted Reading is an integral part of reading and writing strategy that improves a child’s reading ability and should be personal tailored to each child’s developmental needs and provided regularly. The teacher should be engaged in creating a reading-friendly environment for pupils to be able read without interruptions.
Language Experience is an important condition of successful learning. Teacher should teach in a language he/she understands well. This will enable them to build on a three step process of understanding how child learns, discovering the child’s lingual weaknesses by careful observation, and utilizing the language to patch up communication difficulties.
Responsive Writing is crucial for the teaching process to be successful because the rapport between teacher and learner is very important. People have various learning needs that are affected by factors that facilitate and inhibit learning such as motivation, readiness, involvement, feedback, repetition, as well as timing, environment, emotions, physiologic events and cultural barriers
In creating a visual aim for some particular group of learners, it is very important to take into account the development of cognitive learning.
Written Conversation technique is very important. The ability to process information when text read is used as such, there is the need to explore the cognitive learning.
Children should be encouraged to retell what they have read to others and the teacher should correct the mistake.
Pupils should use line markers to underline the most important information of the text they read. The teacher should check the underlined parts to see whether they are important.
The next condition is the fact that children should be able to preview the text they are to read.
Conclusion
This will help teachers in perceiving students as information processors enabling them to develop more effective and innovative teaching ideas. This will help the children to acquire and develop learning language (Reichl, 2009).
References
Chamot, A. U. (2001). Scott Foresman ESL.: Accelerating English language learning, Volume 1. New York: Pearson Education, Limited.
Reichl, S. (2009). Cognitive Principles, Critical Practice: Reading Literature at University. Göttingen: V&R Unipress GmbH.
Reid, J. M. (2000). The Learning Style Preferences of ESL Students. Tesol Quarterly , 21 (2), 87-110.