Back to Basics

When you learned to read as a small child, I’m sure the first thing you remember was being taught the alphabet. Perhaps, if you’re a parent yourself, you taught your own child the alphabet song in your native language.

It’s obvious to us that without a child learning the letters needed to make up a word, she can’t learn how to read the word and later discover its meaning. So, I’m always amazed that many language programs, learners and teachers overlook starting with the alphabet when beginning English language instruction.

This often occurs because many learners already know how to read in their native language, leading to the assumption that this skill will easily transfer to another language. Knowing how to read means you can read in any language as long as the letters are in the same script, but you don’t know what you are reading. By ‘what’, I mean you don’t know the names of the letters and their corresponding sounds.

This is a huge issue with many of my students who regularly mispronounce words because they haven’t looked carefully at the English alphabet. Additionally, the English alphabet, when compared to many other alphabets such as Turkish, Russian or Hindi is very problematic because it is not phonetic.

Phonetic alphabets make learning languages relatively straightforward. For example, in Turkish if I sound out ‘m’, ‘a’, ‘s’ and ‘a’ I can perfectly pronounce ‘masa’. In English the same word is made up of ‘t’, ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘l’ and ‘e’ spelling table. If we read this word phonetically like Turkish, we would end up saying: ta’be’leh but the word is said: tay’buhl.

I therefore always advise my students to take two steps: 1) Learn the 44 Phenomes of the English language and 2) Learn and memorise entire words and not individual letters.

The first step you can take yourself by looking at the table below. Each phoneme has an IPA Symbol (International Phonetic Alphabet). This is a representation of the sound it makes. A Grapheme is how that sound shows up in an English word. So the Phenome ‘h’ might be represented in a word as ‘h’ or ‘wh’ but its sound will always be identical as in house or whose.

Practice the sounds of each phenome before memorising the corresponding letter or letter combination and stud the provided examples. Once you know what sounds you are reading you can go to the second step and start learning and memorising words.

A very effective and easy way to do this is to use one of the great websites the provides free English content. For instance, Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org/) has over 70,000 free books not only in English but in other languages. Stories and books, appropriate for all ages are both audio and written forms.  

This is important because when you are just starting to learn English you can’t be expected to know how every word sounds. So, a trick is to download two versions of the same content. As an example, I adore the author Jack London. A search for him on Project Gutenberg results in his famous book, Call of the Wild appearing in audio and written forms. By downloading both versions and playing the audio while you follow along with the written word, you will being to memorise entire words; their letters, their sounds and their meanings.

Many of my students have taken this advice and achieved great improvement in their English fluency. All it takes is some time and commitment.

It can be hard to self-study and its not for everyone but for those of you who can do it, I say go for it! For the rest of you, consider contacting us today at iNJoy English Online to discuss a personal study plan with a regular teacher.