Many parents are convinced that English will be useful to their child in the future - and this is true. Knowledge of a foreign language will be an undeniable advantage when looking for a job. It's easier to travel with English. It is for this reason that children begin to master the English language after they become familiar with their native speech, and sometimes even earlier. And the question of reading in English does not lose its relevance for parents.

Phonemic reading

Parents and teachers thinking about how to teach children to read in English will be interested in two main approaches - phonemic and visual. Both cases have their difficulties and advantages. The first method is familiar to everyone; it is classic and widely used in educational institutions to teach children English. Language acquisition with this approach begins with understanding letters and transcription, and reading itself begins with words. Moreover, in these words the pronunciation of vowels that the baby recognizes is practiced. This is the main disadvantage of this approach. After all, the baby goes through words that are not commonly used.

It is not possible to quickly teach a child to read English using this method - for quick results it is better to use the visualization approach. After all, the phonemic method assumes that you have to memorize many different words in order to master all the rules of pronunciation. As a result, the baby processes a large amount of information - and it is not a fact that it will be useful to him in the near future. Phonemic reading is also a longer process than visual reading. A child can go through more than half of the entire textbook. And after that, it will reproduce only a couple of lines of text that are not connected by any special meaning. However, this method also has an undeniable advantage that the visual method does not have - a year after the start of learning phonemic reading, children will know transcription signs, as well as the basic rules of reading.

Visualization method

Currently, entire classes studying communicative methods use this method. Recently, it has been very actively introduced into the school education system. And parents have many questions about the use of this method, because in many ways it is new and unusual for them. Parents are rightly surprised: how can you let your child read words if he doesn’t know the transcription?

In this regard, the question arises: how to teach children to read English using the visualization method? This approach involves the child reading words out loud and repeating them after the teacher. In this approach, letters are mastered along with words. At the same time, the child must remember that a specific word (this picture) is pronounced in this way and not otherwise, although some letter in this word may be called differently in the alphabet. For example, the baby must remember to read the word “clock”. Here he does not go into detail about why the letter combination “ck” is read as “k”. When children reach the final stage of learning to read using this method, they already know at least one word per letter in the alphabet. These are the first steps in learning to read using visualization.

The advantages of this technique are as follows: almost immediately after learning the English alphabet, children receive a list of words to study, which they remember visually and auditorily. At this stage, children can already read both dialogues and simple texts. Kids do all this without knowing the rules of reading. After all, in the English language there are a large number of different exceptions, and they often occur in the most common words. Therefore, one way or another they will have to be learned by heart.

Disadvantages of the visualization method

For many parents, the problem is how to teach their child to read in English. Lessons and homework take a lot of effort, and therefore, in elementary school, parents often tend to choose simpler methods. In this case, a visualization method may be useful. Another advantage is that it makes reading meaningful. After all, after just a couple of weeks of training using the visualization method, a child can read a short dialogue. Accordingly, his motivation increases. And these are no longer long and boring phonemic reading classes, when the child cannot reproduce any meaningful text for a long time. But it is with the help of reading skills that speaking skills develop.

The visualization method allows you to master a useful skill - reading by keywords. In other words, the child can predict which word in the text will come next. For example, he knows that after “I” comes “am”, and after “My name” comes “is”. This skill is very useful for developing reading fluency in the future.

Disadvantages highlighted by old-school teachers

Many representatives of the “old school” speak out against this method. Since teaching children to read in English, they believe, is impossible if they do not know how to read a particular sound. The disadvantage of this approach is precisely that children can confuse words that differ by only one letter. After all, the baby perceives the word as one integral lexical unit. And when he comes across new vocabulary, he simply does not know how to read it. And since he has no idea about transcription, he cannot use a dictionary. The child will not know the basic rules of reading. The visualization method allows us to only guess about them. And so in middle school, because of this approach, reading begins to deteriorate.

Which method should you choose?

Those parents who are wondering how to teach their children to read English should not go from one extreme to another. On the one hand, you can’t do without rules. On the other hand, it should be remembered that there are a lot of exceptions in English speech. And you still have to learn such words by heart, have an idea of ​​how they look and how they are pronounced.

It is believed that it is precisely for remembering exceptions that it is good to use the visualization method. This approach will be especially useful when children are just learning the alphabet and can remember a large number of frequently used words. This will prevent you from spending too much time on the rules. However, the child should also be given some basics of letter-phonetic analysis so that the child does not fall into a stupor when faced with an unfamiliar word. This can be done with the help of special exercises. For example, insert missing letters into words. It is also useful to form a whole word from its parts. This will allow the child to perceive not the whole word, but its parts, and learn the elements of letter-sound analysis.

How to teach a child to read English at home: the problem of mismatch between pronunciation and spelling

This is one of the most important problems for both children and adults. Some students overcome this difficulty quickly, while others take a little longer. How to teach a child to read in English and cope with understanding this discrepancy? It's best to start with the simplest words. For example, such as “Kate”, “car”, “show”. Gradually, the baby will move from reading simple words to longer and more complex ones.

Selection of books

Usually the time when the question of how to teach a child to read in English becomes urgent for parents, nannies and teachers - 2nd grade. A parent or teacher needs to choose the right literature for children. They should contain bright pictures. It is advisable that the total number of words and exercises be small, because otherwise the child’s interest in learning may significantly decrease.

Reading difficult words

When more or less simple words have been mastered, you can move on to more complex lexical units. Every time it is necessary to show the child how this or that word is read. It is important that the child remembers the entire word. It is also necessary to control the baby’s pronunciation so that the word is remembered correctly.

Audio materials

It is best to use special audio materials in addition. This method will be useful to those mothers and fathers who are interested in how to teach their child to read English at home. You can invite your child to repeat the words after the speaker on the tape. At first, the child may find it funny, or the baby may be shy. But with the right approach, progress will soon become obvious. This way you can kill two birds with one stone by teaching your child both reading and pronunciation. This will help your baby learn to feel the intonation of the English language.

It is important not only to learn to speak this language, but also to read the written text. This will help you remember new words better, express your thoughts correctly, and in general, reading is interesting! If you ever take an English proficiency test, any of them will have a section on correct reading. So both children and adults learning English need to learn to read.

What to read?

If children start with bright pictures with English letters and with the simplest audio and video aids, which, based on the verbal perception developed in children, offer the basics of reading, then adapted books are needed for adults. They are designed for a wide variety of vocabulary, for example, Penguin Readers offers the following levels of adaptation of literary works:

• Easystarts– for a simple start (with a reserve of 200 words).
• Beginner– entry level (300 words).
• Elementary– basic knowledge (600 words).
• Pre-intermediate– pre-intermediate (1200 words).
• Intermediate– medium (1700 words).
• Upper-intermediate– advanced intermediate (2300 words).
• Advanced– advanced level (3000s catch).

In this case, you can choose a book in the British or American style, classical or modern.

How good is this reading?

Reading adapted books has a number of advantages:

• The ability to select literature that suits your language level and vocabulary.
• Gradually improve by moving to higher level books.
• Such books are soft-bound, light in weight and volume, and can be read on public transport on the way to work or school.
• You don’t need to look for these books in specialized stores; you can buy them directly in the subway.
• The last pages contain tasks, crosswords, and explanations of complex words.

Adapted books, unlike boring textbooks, make learning to read an enjoyable experience. Matching the degree of adaptation of books to the actual level of vocabulary removes the barrier that is a lot of unfamiliar words. You can even find Shakespeare and Agatha Christie in a simplified presentation and select the appropriate audio accompaniment to practice not only reading the text, but also the correct pronunciation of words. If we are learning to read English from scratch, this literature will be especially useful.

Required skills.

In order for the reading process to bring maximum benefit when learning a language, it is necessary to develop certain skills that will allow you to assimilate new knowledge faster and spend less effort:

1. There is no need to pay attention to memorizing how to pronounce each word. Better master phonetic principles, learn all 44 sounds used in the English language - then you will be able to read any word, even an unfamiliar one, correctly.
2. Read aloud– this will allow you, while learning to read, to also get rid of your accent and gain skills that will be useful in real communication. By reading to yourself, you will not practice oral speech.
3. Some attention is required devote time to studying grammar English language, features of the formation of speech structures and numerous tenses. By mastering the rules, you will learn to use grammatical forms intuitively.
4. Important constantly expand your vocabulary. The fewer unfamiliar words you have, the easier it will be to understand the language. In books you can find different ways of using words and it is easy to remember them.
5. Necessary read regularly, devoting 1-2 hours daily to this matter, memorizing all new words, increasing the speed of reading, repeating the text read to clarify its content.

English for children: learning to read.

We offer you some tips that you can use when teaching children the basics of English.

1. Do not pay attention to the transcription - it is not needed to read. Transcription icons are used to understand how an unfamiliar word is read. This information is only used to build a dictionary, and young children do not do this. They have many ways to learn how to read words correctly - textbooks with audio applications, computer-readable dictionaries on tablets and smartphones. In the end, any online dictionary has audio and allows you to hear how to pronounce a particular word correctly. For a young student, transcription becomes an additional language used to decipher English. He recently learned Russian letters, but they added English ones to him and he has to keep some other transcriptions in his head - he doesn’t need it!
2. Under no circumstances should you try to make life easier for a child by signing their pronunciation in Russian letters under English words. The pronunciation of English words is very different from Russian: many sounds do not exist in Russian at all. If a child reads Russian hints, it will hopelessly ruin his pronunciation. And the way he remembers it as a child will remain forever, and he will have a terrible accent in English. In addition, he will remember not the word in English, but the Russian interlinear, and the word itself, meeting it again, may not recognize it. Therefore, if we are already learning to read in English, do not interfere with the Russian language in our studies.

Children begin to learn language from the alphabet and sounds, and it is the sounds that play the most important role. The child learns the alphabet with various alphabet songs, of which there are many on the Internet. And in order to learn to read, he must learn the relationship between letters and sounds: a letter and several words that begin with it are remembered.

Methods of teaching children language.

The most commonly used method in children's textbooks is the whole word method, which involves pictures, written words, and their pronunciation. The child does not understand the word into sounds; his visual image is associated with the correct sound. This allows you to learn words without even learning all the letters. Then, having encountered a word in the text, the child recognizes it and reads it correctly. This method is also convenient because in the English language there are too many exception words to the rules, and without knowing the rules, you can memorize words.

Another method offers a selection of words that are read according to the same rule. The baby retains the patterns of reading in his memory. For example, having parsed the group of words cat-fat-mat-bat, the child will read the word “sat” correctly.

It is better to use both methods simultaneously; they complement each other well. At 4-5 years old, a child can already master a whole book - if it contains a large picture and a small sentence with simple vocabulary on each page. Thanks to the wide variety of literature, in kindergarten and at home we master not only oral English for children, we learn to read the simplest books.

Features of children's education.

The benefits of teaching English to children starting from 3-5 years old are quite objective, because their psychological characteristics make this task easier:

• The child’s psyche is not yet loaded with stereotypes, and it is easier for him to perceive the peculiarities of a foreign culture.
• Kids willingly imitate, imitate sounds and words, and actively communicate.
• The visual and auditory sensitivity of babies is maximum, they have excellent memory, easily remembering even difficult English words and phrases.

On the other hand, we can note the following characteristics of young children:

• They get tired very quickly and cannot stand a lesson longer than 3 minutes.
• Children cannot keep their attention on something for a long time, so they need to alternate activities - play with pictures, sing a song, leaf through a book.
• Kids have visual-figurative thinking; they understand images and objects better than explanations and explanations.

Thus, if we learn to read English from kindergarten, optimal conditions must be created for children.

You can familiarize yourself with the assortment in more detail in the catalog of our online store.

Transcription and reading rules in English are two closely related concepts. Reading rules explain how letters and letter combinations are pronounced in different cases, and with the help of transcription we record and read speech sounds.

Reading rules can confuse a beginner. There are many of them, they are confusing, and there are more exceptions than the rules themselves. In fact, these rules are only so scary if you understand them deeply and try to learn them by heart, along with the exceptions. In reality, everything is much simpler: reading rules do not need to be remembered by heart.

While studying English, you will constantly be doing something, and soon you will learn to correlate letters and sounds without thinking, automatically. There is no need to worry about exceptions either. Usually the pronunciation, spelling and meaning of a word are remembered as one whole - you just know that such and such a word is pronounced this way.

Feature of English phonetics: we write “Manchester” - we read “Liverpool”

The phonetics of the English language has a noticeable feature: words are often read differently from how they are written, that is, from the spelling of a word it is not always possible to guess how it is pronounced. As linguists joke: “We write “Manchester”, but read “Liverpool.”

In the history of many languages, the following pattern can be traced: the phonetic structure becomes more complex, but the letters and spelling remain the same or change with great delay. English is no exception. At the dawn of its development, words were read and pronounced more or less similar, but over time this discrepancy became greater and greater, the situation was aggravated by the diversity of dialects, and now we are in words though, thought And through read a combination of letters - ough completely different, although the words themselves differ by one letter.

No one is in a hurry to reform English spelling, there are many reasons for this. For example, the English language has long no longer had a single “control center”. Reforms initiated in London may be coolly received in Sydney and rejected in Washington. And in general, spelling reform is always a painful process that meets resistance among a significant part of native speakers. It's much easier to leave it as is.

What is transcription and why is it needed?

Transcription in English is the recording of speech sounds using special characters. She should not be afraid or avoided, because she is a very good assistant in learning the language, which will be great for saving time and helping to avoid mistakes. One glance at the transcription of an English word is enough for you to understand how it is read correctly.

When you memorize or write down a new word that comes across in the text, you definitely need to look at its transcription and/or listen to the pronunciation (for example, in), otherwise you may remember it incorrectly, and then they will not understand you.

Is it possible to write English words in Russian letters?

Sometimes on websites or even in books you can see “English transcription in Russian” or “pronunciation of English words in Russian letters” - that is, writing English words in Russian letters. Like, why learn sophisticated icons if Can convey sounds in Russian letters? Then what it is forbidden. The phonetics of the Russian language differs from the English phonetics so much that the sound can only be conveyed very, very approximately. We simply do not have some sounds of English speech, as well as vice versa.

Transcription and pronunciation of all sounds of the English language separately (video)

With this interesting video table, you can listen to the sound of all sounds separately and see how they are recorded using transcription. Click on play and wait for the video to load completely, then click on the sound you want.

Please note that in the transcription, in addition to the symbols themselves denoting sounds, the following are used:

• Square brackets– traditionally, transcription is always written in [square brackets]. For example: [z].
• Vowel length icon– in English, vowels can be long or short, longitude is indicated by a colon after the vowel. For example: .
• Accent icon– if a word with more than one syllable is transcribed, the stress must be indicated with an apostrophe (comma at the top). It is placed before the stressed syllable. For example: – decision.

In total, there are 44 sounds in the English language, which, like in Russian, are divided into consonants and vowels. Among them there are sounds similar to Russian, for example: [b] - [b], [n] - [n], and sounds that have no analogues in the Russian language: [ ð ], [θ ].

In English phonetics there are no such concepts as softness/hardness of consonants, but there is longitude of vowels (not characteristic of the Russian language) - vowels can be short [a] and long. It should also be noted that vowel sounds in English can be:

• single (monophthongs): [ i: ], [ e ],
• consisting of two sounds (diphtogni): [ ai ], [ ɔi ],
• consisting of three sounds (triphthongs): [ aiə ].

Diphthongs and triphthongs are read and perceived as solid sounds.

English sound table with examples and cards

Having studied how English sounds are pronounced individually, be sure to listen to how they are read whole words. It is often easier for students to understand and hear the pronunciation of English sounds when they are heard as part of a word, rather than separately.

In the tables below, all sounds are given with example words. Using electronic cards you can listen to the pronunciation.

Consonants in English
[ f] fox	[ d] date	[ v] vase	[ k]cat
[ θ ] think	[ g] go	[ ð ] father	[ tʃ] change
[ s] say	[ dʒ] age	[ z] zoo	[ m] mom
[ ʃ ] ship	[ n] nose	[ ʒ ] pleasure	[ ŋ ] sing
[ h]hound	[ l] lazy	[ p] pen	[ r] red
[ b] bro	[ j] yes	[ t] today	[ w] wine

Vowel sounds in English
[ i:] he, she	[ ei] name	[ i] his, it	[ ai] line
[ e]ten	[ au] town	[ æ ] hat	[ ɔi] toy
[ a:] car	[ ou] go home	[ ɔ ] not	[ iə] here
[ ʌ ] nut	[ ɛə ] dare	[ u] good	[ uə] poor
[ u:] food	[ juə]Europe	[ ju:] tune	[ aiə] fire
[ ɜ: ] turn	[ auə] our	[ ə ] paper	[ ɔ: ] all

How to learn to pronounce English sounds?

There are two approaches:

1. Theoretical– textbooks usually have a detailed description of how to press your tongue to the roof of your mouth to form a certain sound. With an illustration showing a cross-section of a human head. The method is scientifically correct, but it is difficult to use on your own: not everyone will understand what it means to “slide the upper teeth along the lower lip” and will be able to perform this action.
2. Practical– listen, watch and repeat. I think it's much easier this way. You simply repeat after the announcer, trying to imitate the sound as accurately as possible. Pay attention to articulation, try to repeat all movements of the lips and tongue. Ideally, of course, someone should supervise, but you can simply record yourself on a webcam and watch from the outside.

If you want to repeat after the speaker, imitating his speech, I recommend using the materials on Puzzle English, namely the “Video Puzzles” exercises, which are aimed at developing listening comprehension. In video puzzles, you can slow down your speech and, as in Lingvaleo, watch the translation of words by clicking on them directly in the subtitles.

In video puzzles, you first need to watch a video and then assemble sentences from words.

Detailed review of this service:

In addition, many kind people have made many videos for practical training that are available on YouTube. For example, these two videos examine in detail the sounds of English speech in the American and British versions:

British pronunciation

American pronunciation

When you start learning English, you shouldn’t strive to achieve “perfect” pronunciation. Firstly, there are a lot of varieties of pronunciation (the “generalized” British and American versions are presented above), and secondly, even native speakers who speak professionally (for example, actors) often take lessons from special trainers in order to master the features of or another version of pronunciation - practicing speech is not an easy task.

Just try to speak in a way that 1) is understandable and 2) doesn’t hurt your ears too much.

Reading rules in English: table and cards

Reading rules in English are, rather, not even rules, but generalized recommendations that are not particularly accurate. Not only can, say, the letter “o” in different combinations and syllable types be read in nine different ways, but there are also exceptions. For example, in the words food, too it is read as , and in the words good, look – as [u]. There is no pattern here, you just need to remember this.

If you look in different books, it turns out that the rules of reading, and indeed phonetics in general, can be told differently by different authors with varying degrees of immersion in detail. I think that there is no point in delving into the jungle of phonetic science (you can dive into it ad infinitum), and the easiest way is to take as a basis the most simplified version of the reading rules, that is reading rules in English for children.

For this article, I took as a basis the rules given in the textbook “English. 1 – 4 classes in diagrams and tables” N. Vakulenko. Believe me, this is more than enough for both children and adults!

What is an open and closed syllable?

In English, there are open and closed syllables; it also matters whether it ends with the letter “r” and whether it is stressed.

A syllable is called open if:

• the syllable ends with a vowel and is the last in the word,
• a vowel is followed by another vowel,
• a vowel is followed by a consonant, and followed by one or more vowels.

A syllable is closed if:

• it is the last in the word, and ends with a consonant,
• A vowel is followed by two or more consonants.

In these cards and the table below you can see how different letters are pronounced in different combinations and syllable types.

Reading rules
Reading the letter “A”
A – in an open syllable	name, face, cake
A [æ] – in a closed syllable	hat, cat, man
A – in a closed syllable on r	far, car, park
A [εə] – at the end of the word vowel + re	dare, care, stare
A [ɔ:] – combinations all, au	all, wall, fall, autumn
Reading the letter “O”
O [əu] – in an open syllable	no, go, home
O [ɒ] – in a closed stressed syllable	not, box, hot
O [ɜ:] – in some words with “wor”	world, word
O [ɔ:] – in a closed syllable with r	form, fork, horse, door, floor
O – in combination “oo”	too, food
O [u] – in combination “oo”	book, look, good
O – in combination “ow”	town, down
O [ɔɪ] – in combination “oy”	toy, boy, enjoy
O [ʊə] – in combination “oo”	poor
Reading the letter “U”
U, – in an open syllable	pupil, blue, student
U [ʌ] – in a closed syllable	nut, bus, cup
U [u] – in a closed syllable	put, full
U [ɜ:] – in combination “ur”	turn, hurt, burn
Reading the letter “E”
E – in an open syllable, combination “ee”, “ea”	he, she, see, street, meat, sea
E [e] – in a closed syllable, combination “ea”	hen, ten, bed, head, bread
E [ɜ:] – in combinations “er”, “ear”	her, heard
E [ɪə] – in combinations of “ear”	hear, near
Reading the letter “I”
i – in an open syllable	five, line, night, light
i [ɪ] – in a closed syllable	his, it, pig
i [ɜ:] – in combination “ir”	first, girl, bird
i – in combination “ire”	fire, tired
Reading the letter “Y”
Y – at the end of a word	try, my, cry
Y [ɪ] – at the end of a word	family, happy, lucky
Y [j] – at the beginning or middle of a word	yes, year, yellow
Reading the letter “C”
C [s] – before i, e, y	pencil, bicycle
C [k] – except for combinations ch, tch and not before i, e, y	cat, come
C – in combinations ch, tch	chair, change, match, catch
Reading the letter “S”
S [s] – except: at the end of words after ch. and voiced acc.	say, books, six
S [z] – at the end of words after ch. and voiced acc.	days, beds
S [ʃ] – in combination sh	shop, ship
Reading the letter “T”
T [t] – except combinations th	ten, teacher, today
T [ð] – in combination th	then, mother, there
T [θ] – in combination th	thin, sixth, thick
Reading the letter “P”
P [p] – except for the combination ph	pen, penalty, powder
P [f] – in combination ph	photo
Reading the letter “G”
G [g] – except for combinations ng, not before e, i, y	go, big, dog
G – before e, i, y	age, engineer
G [ŋ] – in combination ng at the end of a word	sing, bring, king
G [ŋg] – in combination ng in the middle of a word	strongest

The most important reading rules

The table above looks very busy, even intimidating. From it we can highlight several of the most important rules, which have almost no exceptions.

Basic rules for reading consonants

• The combination ph is read as [f]: photo, Morpheus.
• The combination th is read as [ð] or [θ]: think there. These sounds do not exist in the Russian language; their pronunciation requires some practice. Do not confuse them with the sounds [s], [z].
• The combination ng at the end of a word is read as [ŋ] - this is a nasal (that is, pronounced as if in the nose) version of the sound [n]. A common mistake is to read it as . There is no “g” in this sound. Examples: strong, King Kong, wrong.
• The combination sh is read as [ʃ]: ship, show, shop.
• The letter “c” before i, e, y is read as [s]: celebrity, cent, pencil.
• The letter “g” before i, e, y is read as: age, magic, gym.
• The combination ch is read as: match, catch.

Basic rules for reading vowels

• In an open stressed syllable, vowels are usually read as in: no, go, name, face, pupil, he, five. These can be monophthongs and diphthongs.
• In a closed syllable, vowels are read as short monophthongs: nut, got, ten.

How to remember reading rules?

Most people who are fluent in English as a foreign language will not be able to immediately name even a few basic reading rules. Rules readings do not need to be memorized, you need to be able to use them. But is it possible to use what you don’t know? As much as possible! Thanks to frequent practice, knowledge turns into skills and actions begin to be performed automatically, unconsciously.

In order for the reading rules to quickly reach the automatic stage, I recommend:

• Study the rules themselves - read, comprehend, speak examples out loud.
• Practicing reading aloud will help develop pronunciation skills, and at the same time, the rules of reading will be reinforced. Take the text with audio, video with subtitles so that you have something to compare it with.
• Do small written works - writing practice is useful for developing vocabulary, consolidating knowledge of grammar and, of course, improving spelling.

If you can't read English, don't despair. In the same USA, almost 14% of the population, that is, 32 million people, cannot read! Moreover, 21% of the population reads at a fifth-grade level. But it’s never too late to learn to read English! Read this article and you will understand what you need to pay attention to.

Steps

Sharpening the Basics

Start with the alphabet. The alphabet is the beginning of everything, and you will find 26 of its letters in all words. There are different ways to learn the alphabet, choose the one you like.

• Sing. It will sound stupid, but songs are what help many people. The melody allows you to remember letters with minimal effort, shows the entire alphabet and the connection between letters.
  • You can listen to the song online or by downloading it to your player.
• Feel it. If you're more hands-on, make letters out of sandpaper, then look at them, then close your eyes and use your fingers to trace the letter. After this, name the letter and the sound it denotes. Then remove your finger from the paper and use it to draw a letter in the air.
• Move. Take magnets in the shape of letters of the alphabet and move and move them, eventually forming words from them.
• Go ahead. If in a room, then take a floor covering with the letters of the English alphabet. Say the letter - step on the corresponding square. Ask someone to tell you the letters and step on the corresponding squares yourself. Let your whole body participate in the process of learning the alphabet!

1. Distinguish between vowels and consonants. The vowels of English are represented by the letters a, e, o, u and i, while the remaining letters represent consonants.

   • Vowels seem to open your mouth when pronounced, while consonants, on the contrary, close. Vowels are pronounced without unnecessary sounds, but consonants are pronounced together with other sounds.

2. Use the phonics method to teach reading. With this method, you can better understand the relationship between letters and sounds. For example, when you learn when the letter “S” sounds like “sa” and when it sounds like “ka,” or when you notice that the syllable “-tion” is pronounced like “shun,” you are using the phonetic method.

   • Choose one of the two classic methods that is convenient for you. The first one is the so-called “See-tell” when you learn to read whole words, or the so-called. “syllabic approach”, in which you first learn to pronounce individual syllables and their combinations, and only then words.
   • The phonetic method is phonetic because it requires listening to the sound of syllables and words. To do this, you'll need an online program, a DVD, or someone willing to help you learn the pronunciation of different sound combinations.

3. Learn punctuation marks. It is very important to know what all the little squiggles and dots mean, because they carry a lot of important information for the correct understanding of the sentence.

   “Attack” the words. This kind of tactic will help you find out the meaning and pronunciation features of an unknown word, taking it apart and analyzing it step by step.

   • Look for visual cues. Check if there are photos, illustrations or anything like that on the page. Look at what is depicted there and how it may intersect with the meaning of the sentence.
   • Voice the word. Say the word slowly and clearly. Then repeat the sounds themselves that make up the word, separately and clearly, starting from the very first.
   • Split the word. Look at a word and see if it has any sounds, prefixes, suffixes, endings, or stems that you already know. Read each piece, then try to make a whole word out of them and read it.
     • For example, you already know that the prefix “pre” means “before, in advance, before”, and the stem “view” means to look. What does the word “preview” mean? If you break it down into parts you know, you can even guess the meaning - this is a “preview”.
   • Look for connections. Think about whether the words you don't know are similar to those you already know. Think, maybe this is a form of an unknown word, or part of something?
     • Alternatively, try using a word you know in a sentence and see if the meaning is lost. It may turn out that the meanings of two words are close enough to each other to understand the connection between them.

4. Re-read. Have you read the proposal? Let's do it again. Replace words you don’t know with those you know, and analyze whether the meaning appears in the sentence.

   Use your background knowledge. Consider what you already know about the topic of the book, paragraph, or sentence, and use that knowledge to figure out what the word is.

   Make guesses. Look at the pictures, table of contents, chapter headings, maps, diagrams, and other parts of the book. Then, based on what you saw, write what you think about the book as a whole, what it might say, etc. Then start reading and see if your guesses are confirmed.

   Ask questions. After reading the book's title, headings, looking at the images, etc., write down any questions you have about it all. Try to answer these questions yourself while you read the book, and write down your answers. If some questions remain unanswered, well, you’ll have to look for those who can answer them!

   Visualize. Imagine that you are not reading a book, but watching a movie. Carefully, in every detail, imagine the main characters, the setting, and try to imagine how the story will unfold in space-time. It would be a good idea to make sketches of all this.

   Build connections. Think about whether you can draw parallels with what you read from your own experience? Maybe some of the characters in the book remind you of someone you know? Or have you encountered similar situations? Or maybe the book reminds you of a movie? Write down all the connections and intersections that come to your mind - with their help it will be easier to understand the book.