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Reading serves as the basis for students to understand a new language. It is one of the first skills we encourage you to develop because having words in front of you can help you feel more comfortable trying to understand and decipher them.

For students whose original language does not share the English alphabet, that is where we’ll start by learning the alphabet.  For students with native languages that share an alphabet with English, we’ll go over the way words are sounded out, to become more familiar with the English alphabet and the sounds of the English language.

To be able to read fluently you need to be able to recognize sounds and patterns, comprehend the words and understand how they work together in a sentence to convey meaning. We will start with the basics, move on to lower-level reading skills, such as comprehension, and eventually discuss such higher-level reading skills as identifying purpose and intent. We’ll teach you to be reflective about your reading, what works for you and helps you.

Early on in the process of learning to read, we’ll help you learn and form associations between sounds (phonemes) and letters/words. We understand that every student is different so we will tailor your lesson. Learning letter/sound associations is multisensory, so we will use whatever resources we have between us, using relevant reading and writing assignments.  Once you’ve built your confidence with the basics of reading, our next step is to help you develop a proficiency in more advanced reading skills. Summarising is an extremely important skill because it helps you bridge the gap between understanding the words you are reading, and then understanding the meaning that those words are trying to convey.  Our support will then help you identify, understand and manipulate phonemes and the ability to break down and learn new words and the concept behind phonics so you can begin to understand the patterns in how phonemes relate to each other, so you can sound out words that are foreign to you.  By sequencing we’ll have you take a step beyond summarising text, to label, categorise, and compartmentalise what happens in text.  We’ll help you connect thematically with text by relating what is going on, with your own personal experiences, to help you make a stronger connection and make English more accessible.

Once you feel confident, we’ll help you improve your ability to make inferences, reading between the lines and accessing meaning that is not explicitly stated and to accurately draw a conclusion. We’ll work with you on comparing and contrasting two texts, so you can understand the purpose of the text as well as the strategies that you’ll need to convey meaning and distinguish between fact and opinion by the evaluative process.  Well also help you self-question and become more comfortable with reading texts on your own, constantly questioning what is going on, through the use of annotation and by developing an ability to think critically while working with a foreign language.  In our more developed lessons we’ll look at both auditory and visual discrimination and our ability to perceive and distinguish between different elements. Auditory discrimination refers to our ability to organize and categorise sounds, thereby allowing us to make meaning of what we hear, while Visual discrimination refers to our ability to distinguish between letters, shapes, numbers, and objects. 

Writing gives students the opportunity to explore the English language.  Learning to write in a new language, at all levels, can be challenging because you need to have the same base of knowledge as reading to comprehend words and additionally you have to be able to create those words to represent your thoughts and ideas.  Our aim to help you develop your skills in writing in English, taking the next step from reading and empowering you to produce your own words.

We’ll put you in charge. We will help you with the basics of writing in English, including how to craft a sentence, how to  make words work together and how to explore the language through writing. 

Grammar is the set of rules for the English language. We will cover the basics to make sure you have a good basis of knowledge from which to work and so you can understand how to create sentences that are grammatically correct and convey the meaning you are intending.  Understanding sentence structure is a key aspect of grammar, but there are many other grammatical rules. Any two sentences, no matter how different they are, contain two things, a subject and a verb. You’ll develop an understanding of the differences of the five basic patterns for sentence structure in English; Subject-verb; Subject-verb-object; Subject-verb-adjective; Subject-verb-adverb; Subject-verb-noun. We can also explore what happens when sentences get more complex, the use of clauses to form compound and complex sentences.

We can help develop your grasp of nouns and verbs. Nouns can be tricky because the term encompasses many different types of words. When using nouns, one of the grammatical rules you need to look out for most is whether or not you should pluralize a noun and how to do so. We’ll also explore possessive nouns and the types of pronouns. Along with nouns, verbs are part of the two most important parts of a sentence, so it is important that you know how to use them and the rules that govern English verbs.

For students with a decent handle on sentence structure and grammar, we’ll help you learn how to write to convey meaning with informative and explanatory writing, researching and analysing a topic that is already generally accepted to be true. The use of a definition; breaking something into parts, describing a function and explaining why. We will help you develop your persuasive writing skills, understanding of Thesis, Organization, Support, Elaboration, Analysis and Conclusion. If you can master the basic components of a strong argument you will find it much easier to be convincing whenever you are trying to persuade.