What is the right way of learning English? Enough has already been said and written about the short comings of rote learning – which is how most of us learnt the language – if this is not the right method – then what is right?
Language learning is meant to happen intuitively. How did we all learn our mother tongue? We learnt it by listening to the sounds around us; sounds are then translated into words; words then are strung together to make sentences. Fundamentally it is deciphering the sounds that helped us learn our mother tongue; if this is the intuitive and natural way of language learning, shouldn’t we apply the same principle to teach English to our children?
At Phonics Power this is exactly what we do; our basic phonics programme introduces the sounds of English through actions, songs, stories and dramatization. Our children are encouraged to apply their newly acquired sound knowledge to learn reading and spelling. Honing the listening skills is our first step – through listening to the sounds our children learn to read and spell; in the next years, they listen more to learn speaking and comprehension; all of this eventually lead to structural understanding of the language and result in independent writing.