Teaching English as a Foreign Language

140 Part III: Teaching Skills Classes

Choose a piece of writing that your students are likely to be interested in and

is at the right level for them, even if it’s just a couple of words long and writ-

ten on the board. They should be able to understand most of the words on

a printed page except for a handful of new words, which you have a strategy

for dealing with.

Starting with the ABCs

The alphabet is the most basic reading text you can choose. For EFL (English

as a Foreign Language) teachers, using the English alphabet is second nature,

but this isn’t the case for all EFL students. It may surprise you to know that

few students, even those at intermediate level, are comfortable with all 26 let-

ters in their various shapes and sizes – capitals, lower case, handwriting and

print.

It never hurts to run through the alphabet at the outset of a course. Make sure

that everyone in the class can recognise and say the letters out loud.

Actually you can organise the letters of the alphabet in a memorable way

to help students pronounce them accurately. If you’re already familiar with

phonemes (the symbols used to represent all the different sounds in the lan-

guage), you can use them to group the letters. If not, refer to Chapter 12 for

more information.

Even if you don’t use the phonemic symbols, rhyming the letters makes

things clearer for your students. A good place to start is to analyse the

groups and say the letters in Table 10-1 out loud. You can hear that with the

exception of the last group the others are similar in the way they’re pro-

nounced. This form of analysis based on sound pushes students out of any

complacency, as they may believe that they know all the letters based on

visual recognition.

Pay particular attention to the vowels. Even higher-level students get them

wrong.

Table 10-1 Letters, Sounds and Phonemic Symbols

Letters Sound Phonemic Symbol

A, J, K, H ei as in day or weigh /ei/

F, L, M, N, S, X, Z e as in egg or let /e/

B, C, D, E, G, P, T, V ee as in tree or wheat /i/

I, Y ai as in my or lie /ai/

Q, U, W oo as in you or blue /u/

O, R