Having worked overseas as a teacher for over 12 years I am well versed in the difficulties EAL/ESL students have acquiring and apply the English Language to their reading and writing.
Whilst phonics is a part of the English Language and enables EAL students to blend word sounds for reading and segment words for early writing, this skill is useless without the building of vocabulary alongside.
Reading the words on the page is only the first step in becoming a successful reader. Reedy (2012) discussed misconceptions about the teaching of reading. He states that “reading is more than simply saying the words on the page and further, saying the words on the page needs more that phonic decoding if it is to be accurate and meaningful.”
This statement is clear that reading needs higher skills to be a competent reader, and by being able to say the word phonetically does not offer the level of depth needed to be successful.
We place a huge emphasis on vocabulary building for our EAL students so that their decoding of words provides a meaning to them. In turn this word understanding then can be built upon and greater comprehension skills can be taught and developed through guided reading and class shared reading activities.
It is this greater depth of understanding both in the context of the piece they are reading, inference skills and on a word and sentence level that builds competent and confident readers and writers. Children need to understand how to build on root words to change their meaning with suffixes and prefixes, how to turn a sentence into past tense using past tense verbs or how to correctly apply speech marks to show direct speach. It is this explicit teaching that can make a significant difference. Unlike native English speakers they won’t pick up on these intricacies my osmosis, we have to explicitly teach these rules and skill to all EAL learners in our classrooms.
All of this development comes from building vocabulary and understanding. If we get this step right, all EAL students can develop a deeper understanding of the English Language, a greater success in their reading and writing and hopefully a love and fascination with our extremely complex language.
Do you teach EAL learners? What would your too tip be for reading and writing success? Tell us down in the comments.
Hope your having a great week.
Katie x
Adapted Learning 
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