ESL Teaching Strategy: What to do with Absolute Beginners? Start with Phonics and Reading

A common question I get about ESL teaching strategy is what to do with absolute beginners. Many teachers are unsure about the first thing they should teach someone who is just getting started with learning English. My teaching strategy tip for total beginners is to start with phonics and reading skills. Check out the video to find out why I think it's most important to start with phonics instead of focusing on speaking or listening. Teaching English to beginners can be a bit difficult but it's certainly not impossible with these top tips and tricks. Do you want to know more about ESL teaching strategies for beginning students? Check out some of my other videos or leave me a comment below for things you'd like to see. -------------------------------- Try out this simple writing activity for beginners: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxnsWh77tMM ------------------------------ Want to find out more about teaching English to beginners? Check out: https://www.eslactivity.org/ ESL Reading Activities for Kids: https://amzn.to/3oc4ep8 Even more Ideas for the TEFL Classroom: https://eslspeaking.org/ https://www.facebook.com/eslspeaking https://www.pinterest.ca/eslspeaking/ https://www.instagram.com/jackie.bolen/ https://www.tiktok.com/@englishwithjackie #teachingenglishwithjackie #beginners #teachingreading #phonics #tefl -------------------------------- Learn more about teaching ESL to absolute beginners from @elttraining https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UiC2_UZlts&t=15s -------------------------------- Transcript for teaching ESL to beginners: Hey everybody, it's Jackie from eslspeaking.org. A common question that I get from teachers is what to do with absolute beginners. If you have a group of students in your class who basically know essentially no English, how do you go about teaching them? One of my favourite ESL teaching strategies for this level of student, the absolute beginner is working on phonics. I know that's a bit controversial. I think there's definitely a camp of people who would say when we're babies when we're first learning a language, we learn by listening first, then speaking and then finally we learn reading and then writing after that. I agree, however, I think the foundation of learning a language is phonics and learning how to read. I've honestly, in my whole 15 years of teaching English, I've never met a student who was I would say fluent in English without being proficient in reading. Reading is so necessary for working on vocabulary. Of course, you can't write if you can't read well. As well, reading is key to understanding what's happening in the world around us. If you want to study in a formal class, you'll be using a textbook of some kind, which requires reading skills. I mean, you can possibly be quite good at speaking and listening and be even fluent in speaking without being able to read well. Of course, it's normal for people in all countries, there are illiterate people who obviously can listen and speak perfectly but may not be able to read. However, that's kind of the exception and yes, for a language teacher or language learner, I honestly don't think that's the best strategy. So teachers, if you have absolute beginners and have no idea what to do, my advice is to focus on phonics and reading skills. That way students can learn vocabulary on their own, they can review what you've taught them at home, they can start reading simple English books or newspapers, they can start doing extensive reading, and they can study for tests easily if you're going to give tests in your class, they can do all sorts of stuff like that. And of course, they can use reading as a springboard to work on their writing skills as well. Okay, so if you like this video, please hit like, subscribe, and leave a comment below. Tell me what you think: Do you think that reading and phonics are foundational or that speaking is the first skill that absolute beginners should learn in a language class. Timestamp 0:00 Intro 0:19 Start with phonics 1:24 Possible to be good at speaking without reading? 1:53 Why start with reading skllls? 2:19 Conclusion Tags: esl beginners, teaching esl beginners, esl beginner, beginner esl, absolute beginner english, english beginner, english beginners, adult beginners esl, teaching ESL to absolute beginner