Reading
Reading lessons aim to foster a love of reading, build confidence, and equip children with the skills they need to be fluent readers and creative, confident writers.
Instructors and children work towards these goals through activities that incorporate listening, speaking, reading, writing, and collaboration. Children also achieve shorter-term goals at each learning level as they build greater fluency. The activities described here are examples of how instructors engage learners and help them progress toward the key objectives of each level. Implementers of TaRL programmes can create their own, context-appropriate activities, guided by children’s current levels and key learning goals. In line with many TaRL assessments, there are five reading levels (beginner, letter, word, paragraph, and story). Depending on the number of instructors available as well as the number of children in each group, appropriate levels might be grouped together. Instructors are careful to note when children improve and, once children are able to read at one level, instructors move them on to the next.
Beginner & Letter Levels
The goal for this group is to build confidence and self-expression, make decoding text less scary, and provide a firm foundation for recognising letters and phonemes (small, separate sounds that make up a word). In the first few levels, children practise reading words and simple paragraphs, along with learning the systematic process of decoding letters and phonemes to “sound out” words. To achieve this, Pratham uses a combination of the whole language (which focuses on making sense of the skills used in reading and writing) and phonics (which focuses on the sounds make by letters) approaches. Pratham’s teaching and learning approach incorporates reading, writing and speaking, and highly values collaboration in the classroom. Through systematic focus on decoding, using phonetics activities, Pratham also helps children to map letters to sounds. For children who are unable to identify letters, text can be very intimidating. To overcome this, TaRL classes expose children to letters, words, and longer text daily. Instructors encourage children to read often, and praise them for their effort.
Word Level
Since children at the Word Level are able to read words by sounding out letters and phonemes, they no longer need to practice with a phonetic chart. They begin to build fluency, recognising the structure of sentences and creating their own sentences. This is achieved through daily exposure to words, sentences, and simple paragraphs, as well as practice in writing their own sentences.
Paragraph Level
At Paragraph Level, instructors aim to strengthen learners’ understanding of grammar and punctuation, instil a habit of daily reading, and strengthen reading comprehension. When children are able to read a simple paragraph or short story fluently, they are better equipped to begin reading and writing longer texts, and to start using text to think about more complex concepts. Children at these levels practice their critical thinking skills through comprehension activities.
Story Level
Children at the level are fluent readers, capable of reading longer texts. Instructors focus on improving reading comprehension and presenting more complex texts. They also encourage creativity and help learners to plan and organize their writing.