how is reading taught in other languages?

[Periwinkle007]

just curious, is it also through phonics?

Made up (non words) are used because they are the most effective method of testing reading accuracy- which is why I find the "moans" about the phonics check odd. It's an effective method used for decades.

Being effective doesn't mean it's right. I gather the Romans got on well with nailing people up in the air on pieces of wood.

Mrz - but why such a proper test. I somehow imagine any teacher worth its profession would be able to do this in a normal day-to-day setting.

I know DD played rounds of alien bingo in the last weeks, she had the test on Tuesday and suddenly it seemed the fun was out of it as she was there sitting alone with her teacher. She is not even 6 yet.

By all means check progress but I somehow think it can be done better.

First reading book brought back from swiss school was an easy reader style chapter book version of Cornelia Funke's The Princess Knight, a picture book in English. And it was 5 months from starting school mid-August to being sent home with the book in January.

Still, I do think they learn very quickly here and that's not only due to them being older but also the groundwork done in kindergarten.

My girls are taught to read flemish in Belgium using the phonics method, which then progresses to short words - maan, roos,vis - if I remember correctly. There are more then 40 phonomes (is that the correct word?) in flemish/dutch which is similar to english.

My girls have been taught to read in flemish and can read in english without any real difficulty, without any extra teaching.

Children are taught to read and write at the age of six and are usually reading and writing without the first term, within 3 months.

my dd learnt to read German first which was straight-forward. They had a book known as a Fibel which concentrated on a few sounds per page and quite a bit of text of a continuing story which used a lot of the new sounds on that particular page. After that she was on to a chapter book. It was no problem at all. Started in September and she was reading the Magic Treehouse books in January in German. Once that was sorted, I taught her to read English with no method, simply used books and since she had already grasped the concept of decoding one language, the other wasn't too difficult. She was reading the same books in English a couple of months later.

I think the later start is a good thing. I am rather glad that dd had longer in kindergarten but unfortunately for us, our state changed the law wrt school starting ages for dd's year group and she started two years earlier than German dc would have done usually (due to her birthday she was not quite 6). Prior to that you had to be 7 by September. Another two years at kindergarten would probably have been great actually. Maybe the UK early start is handled so well that it works, I can't judge it from experience. I started school aged 5 and it seemed about right.

with Russian, I first taught dd the alphabet. English and German she spoke as mother tongues but Russian less fluently. You have to learn to read the printed letters and the cursive ones which can be quite different and it is a bit confusing at first since some letters look like ones we use in English but have a different sound (H - N for example). I didn't rush it, I think I spent about a year on that, learning the letters, writing the letters, revising the letters, writing words and linking them up. When the alphabet is grasped, you can get books similar to the German Fibel where you practice one or two sounds per page and read (quite a bit of) text. I didn't find one with a story that carries through the book. They all seem to be a mixture of small stories and poems.These seem to be pretty standard for native speakers of Russian learning to read. However I found it easier to start with small illustrated books for small dc and get used to reading Russian like that in small doses first and build it up from there.

this is really interesting to me - thank you.

In Switzerland then beresh did they learn to read in English (so a second language) in just a few months? what on earth are we doing wrong over here then? Interesting though that you feel the groundwork was all done in the kindergarten environment. Do they teach them letters/phonics there then?

My sister learned Russian as an adult and that is another one of those languages that just seems so complicated to me.

I would love to see an English translation of the reading books used abroad. I know it wouldn't be comparable in some ways because obviously the sounds used in words and therefore required to be practiced are going to be different but it would be fascinating to compare them with the English reading books.

Periwinkle, re. reading books/methods used abroad, this book might interest you:

www.amazon.co.uk/Why-Jacques-Johann-Jan-Read/dp/1589613279/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1371730546&sr=8-1-fkmr0&keywords=Geraldine+Rodgers+jaques+johann

[[http://www.amazon.de/Tobi-Aktuelle-Erstlesebuch-Wilfried-Metze/dp/3060816301/ref=sr_1_16?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1371730859&sr=1-16&keywords=fibel#reader_3060816301] Fibel]

This is the book my dd used in German school. Takes a while to get going, have to move to November to see the texts. The Russian books I mentioned are called an azbuka. I haven't seen any examples you can look inside.

drat

Fibel

this kind of thing for Russian here

My children are in a welsh school and it does seem a much easier process than learning to read in English. They literally learn the welsh alphabet (very similar to English but with additional sounds th dd ll ng rh ch ff) and then off they go! Welsh is very easy to sound out there are very few extra phonics to teach.

Interesting to read that an earlier poster who had children in a welsh school found that they wrote welsh words with English spelling, my kids do the exact opposite! They write in English but use the welsh phonetics so mummy becomes mymi

Erstlesebuch, first reading book! Says it all really.

On teaching reading in Russian, there's this article:
www.academia.edu/399626/A_personal_take_on_synthetic_phonics

I wonder if my daughter can actually read it. I'll ask her tonight.

yes learnandsay, they learnt to read with one of those and after that they move on to their first proper books.

Arabic and Urdu is also taught phonetically.

very interesting - thanks

Periwinkle007 - sorry I didn't phrase that clearly, they read the book in German - it's called Der geheimnisvolle Ritter Namenlos, the book is published in english as a picture book: The Princess Knight.

In kindergarten they did a lot of memory games, spot the difference, pattern matching, no phonics but lots of carefully listening for sounds.

I have one dc who did uk reception and finished it on about ort stage 5 and one who just did swiss kg. They're both good readers now in english and german. Feels like the time I spent doing phonics homework and plodding through the reading books with a tired reception child could have been better spent...

ah ok - I was really REALLY impressed at them managing to master a foreign language so quickly!

thats interesting that they don't actually teach them the phonics but teach the skills needed in order to be able to learn them if that makes sense. it would be interesting to see if because they do patterns and memory work if the children then tend to pick up many words by sight so although taught to decode they are also learning a level of whole word recognition alongside it which helps them.

I haven't had to deal with phonics homework luckily because my eldest was assessed on entry to reception as knowing all the phonics they would be doing in reception and yr1 and my youngest hasn't started yet. She will probably get a certain level of them to learn because she knows the basic ones and some of the double ones (don't know the technical term) but not as many as DD1.

Memory games, spot the difference and pattern matching sounds much more fun to me...

I have learned Lithuanian, Russian, German, French, Spanish and Italian as well as English, and taught some of them too. Phonics was completely sufficient for learning to read all except English. With phonic spellings, u never need anything but phonics.

Only English spellings have more than one sound (go/do, sound/soup, man/many) and pose reading as well as spelling difficulties. Learning to spell French takes a while too, but not as long as English.

Because I did not learn English until the age of 14 and learned the spellings and meanings of words together, one by one, I did not quite realise just how awful English spelling is, until I stopped teaching and took a really close look at the English spelling system.

Anyone who claims that English spelling is not very different from other writing systems does not know what they are talking about. It is exceptionally irregular and learner-unfriendly.

English orthography is a nightmare but it is a bit different for a native speaker learning to read English when this dc can already read another western European language. It isn't then all that difficult. You can already decode a lot for a start, then you can think ahead and make educated guesses. If you read ,"he searched high and low", without knowing the word low, you will probably be able to guess it.

I think learning to read and pronounce English is a big task for speakers of other languages, just as it is for 3-4 year olds trying to get to grips with it in the U.K. You need a lot of word recognition IMO in addition to basic phonics.

Yes, she can read it but threw a major wobbly because the initial words have some letters replaced by pictures of eggs, clusters of trees and the like. (I hadn't noticed that.)

I feel one of Mashabell's lists coming on.......

Hey Masha, you will no doubt be flattered to hear some of your erm, theories were the subject of a translation some of my uni students had to do. (Not set by me, I hasten to add)

They were left a bit wtf as well tbh.