‘Slow it down’ - Helping children to read fluently in the language classroom

by James Savery

Many coursebook reading texts are mainly intended to develop reading comprehension skills or contextualise language. However, children process texts at different speeds and some may still be far from competent or confident readers in their own L1 - so I imagine that there must be quite a lot of interference going on.

There are things we can do as teachers to help our students develop both competence and confidence in reading in English, and in this article I will share a few tips on helping all children to read text in the language classroom.

Read aloud, slow it down, bring it to life

We know that younger children enjoy being read aloud to from a well-illustrated storybook. Older children can benefit from hearing coursebook texts read aloud too. Read the text aloud to the class one sentence at a time, with a simple cue after each sentence for the class to react to, such as a question or instruction.

Here are some example steps with an extract from a coursebook-style text that I wrote (along with my own drawings - for those with the same artistic abilities as you can see I possess, remember that content trumps refinement!):

Extract with coursebook reading task

(Image source - Magdalena Savery)

Last summer, I helped my grandpa. I had to feed his parrot because he was on holiday. Grandpa said that the house key was under a stone. I went to grandpa’s house. But when I got there I couldn’t find the key anywhere! I went to the back of the house and noticed an open window upstairs. That gave me an idea! ...

1. Introduce and create interest in the story using the pictures before reading. This is a particularly important step for children because their knowledge of the world is developing. This is similar to the Celta-approved practice of activating schemata. Even if the children don’t know the language to describe what’s in the pictures, they’ll start thinking about it and will be receptive to that language when they encounter it during the telling of the story.

2. Ask students to listen to and read the text at the same time as you read aloud. Younger children can put their finger on the page and move it along the line as you read. Read the sentence in a lively, interesting way, as though you are enjoying saying it, but at a speed a little slower than normal. ‘Last summer, I helped grandpa...’

3. Give the children a task that involves some kind of action, e.g. ‘Put your finger on grandpa in the picture.’ Check that all the children are doing what you ask and encourage students to look at their classmates, so that they can learn from each other. Offer help where it’s needed, as it’s better to pause a while and help any children who have lost their way, than risk losing a child at any stage of telling the story.

Continue like this, sentence by sentence. E.g. ‘I had to feed the parrot because he was on holiday’ could lead to the prompt, ‘Show me feeding a parrot.’ If the children mime this action correctly, it shows they understood one of the core meanings in the sentence. They will learn from each other by watching such actions - this is an aspect of social learning at work. If the students seem unsure, you can mime the action yourself. One hand can be the parrot, the other can feed it. The teacher’s involvement here is like a form of scaffolding - if the children need help, the teacher can mime as well, but if they don’t, or if you want to give them a slightly larger challenge, this support can be removed.

This approach slows the text down and some may point out that faster readers might be bored, but I have found that children of all reading abilities are engaged, especially if the prompts you give are themselves engaging.

Texts generate a rich pattern of associations, processed at different rates.

Reading the text slowly gives children more time to process these associations and build up their understanding as the text progresses. They have more time to combine top-down with bottom-up processing and differentiate their L1 spelling system from English spelling, which is less regular and rule-based than many languages (or, to use more fancy terminology, English has a greater orthographic depth than many other languages).

The sentence is a convenient form for bottom-up processing since it contains smaller units and grammatical chunks which children have more time to notice and take in. Last summer, or That gave me an idea.

Possible cues to get children to respond after reading aloud a sentence:

• Point to a picture
• Mime the action
• Make a sound effect
• Draw a picture in the air, or on a mini-whiteboard (Mini-whiteboards can be distributed and shared by pairs of students)
• Say a word
• Point to a word in the text which corresponds to a word you give the meaning to, e.g. by mime, drawing, synonym, antonym or translation (if teaching a monolingual class)
• Count the words in a sentence or the letters in a word.

Some tips:

• Children have a good sense of taste when it comes to stories, and also factual texts on topics that are genuinely interesting to them, so make a careful selection when using this approach. As a rule of thumb, if you enjoy preparing to teach a particular text, it’s likely your students will enjoy reading it with you too.
• When you are first starting out with this approach, spend as much time as you can preparing yourself. Don’t ‘wing it’ without a good degree of experience behind you. If you’re sensitive to embarrassment, find a quiet room somewhere to run through the interactive telling of the story, and to work on the ‘voices’ you might adopt along the way.
• Enjoy the reading and the children will enjoy your interpretation. Experiment with pitch, pauses, pace, other voices for characters, and so forth.
• Use cues which focus on meaning, at least with the first few sentences while you gauge the extent to which the students are following.
• Make exposure to the text as multi-sensory as possible. Focus on the pictures, and ask the children to draw, try out voices, and generate sound effects wherever they can.
• Try to emphasise the fun aspect, appreciating the contributions - and energy! - of individual students.
• Stick to one cue per sentence as more would slow the reading down too much.

The whiteboard

A lot of the text that our students are exposed to will be written on the whiteboard. For younger learners still adapting to reading in English, we ought to offer as much help and encouragement as we can.

Here are some tips to get you started with refining how you present text on the whiteboard in your lessons:

• Write carefully and clearly, using boxes and colours to organise the text, similar to what Stephen Tarbuck suggested in Issue 52 of the IH Journal. Learn to write in as straight and level a line as possible - get used to stepping back to check on your writing, as it’s easy to allow a gradient to creep in! And don’t use markers that are running out of ink - bold, colourful text is much easier for younger learners to parse.
• Slow your writing down, and perhaps even try to stand so the children can watch you write. If they do, you can make this into a little game. E.g. 'Guess the word I'm writing'. Or write on the board while the children are working on something else.
• When brainstorming ideas or when the children say their own sentences, write some of them on the board. Children will pay more attention to the written form of their own ideas than someone else’s.
• Use word cards, which you will have prepared before the lesson, and that can be attached by magnets. A great way to present or focus on grammar is to have the children read the words and arrange them into a sentence.

The element of choice

So far we’ve talked about the teacher reading a story to the class, and the teacher putting text on the whiteboard. In both cases, the choice of text was out of the children’s hands. I think it’s important to introduce the element of choice as soon as possible, and as I wrap up this article, I’d like to spend a moment considering this aspect.

Some children develop the ability on their own, as I did (although I was the last in my class to do so before leaving primary school!). We had a school library with Ladybird readers. I put down my eventual success as a reader to being able to choose what books to read, and many other teachers (and writers!) I’ve spoken to have similar memories.

So as a final tip, I suggest offering a reading choice. Perhaps you can have a reading corner in your classroom with a few graded readers. Or discuss with the class what they would like to read about when planning future lessons.

Whatever approach you adopt, if you do it with enthusiasm and sensitivity, you’ll find that your students are willing to accompany you - and the memories they form might well last a lifetime!

Author Biography

James has worked in ELT for more than 30 years. His first two jobs were teaching business English for IH Turin, then shortly after teaching mainly children at IH Coimbra, Portugal. He later became a teacher trainer and these days his main roles are writing and editing ELT materials. He has also worked in Thailand, Spain, Bahrain and Bolivia. He now lives in Krakow, Poland.