Improving Language Perception

Language Comprehension is the ability to understand oral language and Reading Comprehension the ability to understand written language. Decoding or Word Recognition refers to the assignment of letters to sounds, as well as the recognition of words and meanings of these words.

Being able to decode helps students to read and understand unfamiliar words. This can be trained by listen and repeat exercises. The teacher reads words or sentences and the students repeat after him or her. It is important to tell students to learn not only the spelling of new words but also the pronunciation and maybe even phonetic spelling in order to link the new phonemes to the respective graphemes. 

Language perception means the understanding of oral and written language. To understand the English language, students must acquire three skills: Language Comprehension, Decoding. (= Word Recognition) and Reading Comprehension (= Skilled Reading). These three skills are intertwined, and students need to be strong in all three in order to perceive language well.

Language Comprehension is the ability to understand oral language and Reading Comprehension the ability to understand written language. Decoding or Word Recognition refers to the assignment of letters to sounds, as well as the recognition of words and meanings of these words.

Being able to decode helps students to read and understand unfamiliar words. This can be trained by listen and repeat exercises. The teacher reads words or sentences and the students repeat after him or her. It is important to tell students to learn not only the spelling of new words but also the pronunciation and maybe even phonetic spelling in order to link the new phonemes to the respective graphemes. 

The skill of language comprehension is composed of vocabulary, background knowledge, knowledge of the structure of language and structure of texts and stories. To strengthen these abilities, prepare texts you want to read in the lesson with pre-, while- and post-activities. 

Sources: 

Gough, Philip B., and William E. Tunmer. “Decoding, Reading, and Reading Disability.” Remedial and Special Education, vol. 7, no. 1, Jan. 1986, pp. 6–10, doi:10.1177/074193258600700104.

H. S. Scarborough, in S. B. Newman & D. K. Dickinson (Eds.), 2002, Handbook of early literacy research, p. 98, Copyright 2002, New York, NY: Guilford Press.

Exercise 1: Sound recognition – words in different dialects 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAjBmTFG18w

Give your students different flags of English-speaking countries. Then listen to the YouTube video and let your students guess what country the speaker is from. Pause after each clip and let your students hold up the flag of the country they think the speaker is from. 

Exercise 2: Sight recognition – similar words

Explain to your students that some German and English words look or sound the same/similar. Write some of them on the board and let your students guess what they mean. 

For example:

Accent – Akzent

Address – Adresse

Author – Autor

Complete – Komplett

Carott – Karotte

Grin – Grinsen

State – Saat

Wool – Wolle

Exercise 2: Pre-, While-, Post-activities

Most textbooks provide the structure of pre, while and post by providing certain exercises, as for example in Camden Market 2. The article is the text your pupils will have to read, and in order to prepare them for this task you could do exercise a). This exercise is important because your students will not know all of the new words in the text, but reading the title and looking at pictures will give them an idea about the content and will train to find the meaning of an unknown word from the context. Furthermore, you could give background information about the article, as it helps students to better understand new texts.  

While reading or listening, give your students a specific task, otherwise longer texts might overwhelm them. You could ask wh-questions (Who? Where? What? When?), questions about the global understanding of the text (Find out what the text is about.), questions about specific information (How many days was Goldie free?), or detailed information (What happens first, second, finally?)

Post-questions or activities help to make sure everyone has understood the text/message and to challenge students to think further. Telling the story in your own words as in c) is already very challenging, while d) is a great question to include all students to think about the topic in more depth.