Looking for advice on teaching 5 year old bilingual DS to read and write English

[angelberg]

Hi, we live in germany. My DS is 5 and in a German Montessori pre-school, will be starting a German-speaking primary school officially next summer. He's bilingual, and I am consistent about speaking english to both him and his 2 year old brother. He enjoys English, and I would like that to extend to reading and writing when he's able... I don't want to be pushy, but does anyone have any tips on books I can read that will give me a good idea of what's the best way to teach him to read English? For example, are phonics cards a good idea? I don't want to end up confusing him while he's still just getting to grips with reading and writing German. Thanks for any advice/recommendations - especially if specific to German/English bilingualism!

You can buy Elsie Marinarik's Little Bear stories in both English and German. You can also buy infant books with the German text on one page and the English text on the other page.

We're a bilingual En/Ger family. What we've found is that (with a few minor explanations) a child with phonics knowledge schooled in English can read German without any difficulty. But my strong suspicion is that would be far from true in reverse, the reason being that the English language is a complete mess and requires a prolonged period of active study. German schools teach English as standard. If I was in your position I would support his formal state-sponsored English education, possibly (before hand ) buy infant picture books with nouns written below the pictures of objects on each page. (I would treat any pre-preparation I had done at home as purely out of interest, curiosity and a family behaviour rather than an English education proper, for the reasons given above.)

In England most schools use Jolly phonics or Ruth Miskin Read Write Inc to teach reading. I think that Jolly Phonics is better for teaching phonics as its very child friendly, but the Ruth Miskin decodable books are better than the Jolly Phonics decodable books. Another publisher you might look at for beginners books is Jelly and Bean

I suggest you get the Jolly phonics teachers manual as it has loads of resources and explains how phonics works and use the reading books from the companies I have mentioned.

I suggest that you have a look at the Phonics International website (which will give you lots of information about teaching phonics) and contact Debbie. I know that her programme is used in Spain from an early age and, although it clearly isn't quite the same as advice from a German/English perspective, she could put you in touch with teachers who are using it and who would be able to give you some guidance.

Phonics is clearly the way to go as, I understand, that is how German children are taught, so your DS would be familiar with the way it works and not be having to cope with a different 'method' as well as a different language.

www.phonicsinternational.com

Sure, but phonics is only useful for teaching half of the English language, the other half uses words which have irregular letter/phoneme/grapheme correspondences, like sugar, cello, yacht, women and so on. If you want to learn to read properly in English phonics only gets you so far. To travel the rest of the journey you actually need to understand something of the language itself.

columngollum Phonics is a good starting point for a five year old who can speak English. The OP son is bilingual so is in a similar position to a UK reception child.

I doult that there are many five year olds who can read words like "like sugar, cello, yacht, women and so on" even if they are taught by look say/ mixed methods. Rome was not built in a day and you can't teach a child to read in a day.

I don't know how many 5yos can read them, but mine can.

If you want to teach your child to read English then you have to do the job properly. There's no point in teaching the child to read half of the English language. The problems start with everyday words like one, two and the.

I work in a school with 98% EAL. Most start nursery and reception with no English. We start them with phonics like any other early years unit. Proud to say by end of ks1 our reading and writing level 2s are in the 90s :)

Treat it as any other 5 year old starting to read and write. Make connections between the 2 languages obviously, ie. come across a new word in English and ask if they know the German word. Dual books are great. There is a fantastic website but I can't remember the name so ill get back to you. A dual language first picture dictionary would've interesting too...

The tricky words, the, go, does etc can be taught using sight recognition techniques.

"I don't know how many 5yos can read them, but mine can. "

Prehaps your children have had more reading instruction than the average five year old. Most children are not gifted enough to teach themselves how to read by five and need adult help to achieve the skill of reading. An average child who has just started school and had no hot housing will not be ready for such hard words.

Most beginner readers can't read those words. Certainly my four year old can't and I am not worried. Children have to start off somewhere on their reading journery. There are all kinds of skills that a proficent reader needs and those skills can't be achieved overnight. Phonics gives a fanastic foundation.

Even tricky words are often partially phonetic. There is a difference between an educated guess and randomly guessing words.

My dd was taught to read in French using a combination of letter sounds and whole word recognition. She translated the exact same technique to reading in English. We just bought a load of early readers and didn't stress too much. I didn't attempt anything until she started reading at school as I didn't want to confuse her. I now just make sure we buy books in both languages.

"The tricky words, the, go, does etc can be taught using sight recognition techniques." some schools do teach as sight words but are meant to be taught them as words containing spellings not yet learnt (and the spelling is introduced at that point and child taught to blend the word) if following government guidelines .

Columngollum's words
the letter can represent the sound /sh/ as in sugar Sean sure
the letters is a common spelling for /ch/ in words with Italian origins like cello and vermicelli

yacht has an unusual spelling for /t/ but the letters can represent the sounds /o/ (usually after a /w/ sound - was. want. squash, watch, quality, swan ...)

Mrz...thanks, not an early years practitioner as you can tell! That's how I'm introducing then to my dd...playing bingo with the high feequency words. I may be coming back to pick your brain at some point!! :)

Lots of EY teachers confuse HFWs with sight words and introduce them that way. If you teach me as a sight word the child can read me but if you teach them that the spelling e can be /ee/ they can read me, he, she, we, be etc

My kids learned to read French first (phonetically), then just picked up English on their own pretty quickly afterwards as we've always had books in both languagues at home.

I've had to buy workbooks and push them to learn spelling and grammar, though, but they got the hang of it all easily enough by 11.

I think it's quite reasonable to teach reading side by side in 2 languages. Once a child has a grasp of phonics then it can be applied to other languages quite easily. A lot of the letters make similar sounds. Some will differ - but you just point out that these make different sounds in the 2 languages.

I have friends who did this when teaching their DCs their 2 native languages as well as the English they were learning at school. The children are fluent in 3 languages.

Yes, I see that...thanks mrz

Sorry to high jack the thread, she does seen to respond to learning the 'trickier hfw' words by sight though. She also likes sounding phonemes and blending but is defo using both strategies. She's 3.5 so we're really only doing little bits as we read together and as she's asking about words etc. would you personally encourage the way you describe mrz?

The ultimate aim is for children to have automatic recognition of words but providing the additional knowledge allows a child to apply that to other words without the need to work it out for themself.

I think the advice for bilingual children learning to read is that you learn to read in one language first, especially if the phonetics of the two languages are significantly different. Once a child is able to read you introduce the second language.

You will find more about this on multilingual munchkins, a community with all sorts of information and advice for parents bringing up bilingual children

Thanks mrz...

We are the opposite, German/English bilingual but living in England. With the added complication that we are actually Swiss, accordingly we don't write as we speak; in order to read/write in 'proper' German, DS needs to learn it first. Or, I suspect, in parallel.

If you are looking for a way to just play around at reading in English a bit, you could try Reading Eggs or some such. Your child will already have gathered that there is a relation between letters and sounds, and learning phonics is just that really, except that the relation is different, and more complicated (in German most sounds are represented by just one letter, and most letters represent just one sound; whereas in English there are various letters/letter combinations that make the same sound (you can make the sound /ee/ as e, ee, '-y' etc.), and various sounds are made by the same letter.) But playing around with phonics will help your child learn the different associations of letters/sounds, so whilst they are learning to read properly in German, the differences in English letter/sound associations will be no surprise and easy to adjust later, when you start reading in English properly.