6 Strategies for Teaching Phonics to Older Students
This blog from Continental Press offers suggestions about why phonics are necessary and how to help older students who struggle with decoding English sounds. This is especially important for newcomers, those with interrupted education, and multilingual learners whose native languages are quite different from English. Programs that are structured to meet these students’ specific needs can help them succeed in all of their schoolwork.
These six recommended strategies are listed and explained.
- Assess Individual Needs – There is a link to an assessment for younger students.
- Use Age-Appropriate Materials – High interest, low reading level books are best for older readers. The blog provides links to resources outside of their own for middle school and teens.
- Implement Multisensory Instruction – Tapping out sounds, using colored overlays, highlighting patterns, and chants are four of the eight strategies listed.
- Focus on Morphological Awareness – Teaching prefixes, suffixes, and word roots can also improve comprehension.
- Incorporate Phonics into Content-Area Instruction – This involves breaking down scientific or mathematical terms such as photosynthesis and quadrilateral.
- Digital Tools for Fun Phonics Practice – The recommended websites are suitable up to 4th grade.
Finally, three tips for newcomer ML’s are added.
- Create a Welcoming Environment that makes students feel supported and celebrates their cultures. You can find a blog on this topic here.
- Scaffold Instruction with picture dictionaries, bilingual glossaries, sentence frames, graphic organizers, and anchor charts. Here is a blog devoted to this topic.
- Embrace Students’ Native Language by noting similarities between their languages and English.
This review of the literature about reading comprehension defines it as “the ability to understand written content, grasp its meaning, and integrate it with a reader’s pre-existing knowledge.”
