Phonetic vital for learning English in Primary level

Md Mobin Uz Zaman:

By hearing the sound first and then try to reproduce the sound like that. During my professional visit to primary school, I specially observe the English classes because I am an English pedagogist, teaching Primary school teacher how to teach English in primary. From my observation I found there are some mistakes occurred by primary school teachers in teaching English in primary.

In pre primary class and in class one, teachers often only teachers the English alphabet rather teaching the sound of the alphabet that’s why young learners only can say the alphabet but cannot pronounce many common words in the coming classes.

Learning alphabets without sound can help young learners to write alphabet as well as words but not help them to pronounce the target word correctly and that is very alarming for Bangladesh because after finishing primary level one cannot read any paragraph in appropriate pronunciation let alone thinking about speaking English in daily usual work.

For example, in class one, unit 2 lesson 8 is “counting cats”. Before this lesson they have already learned numbers (1,2,3 and 4) and alphabet (Aa,Bb,Cc,Dd,Ee,Ff).

That means they can count one and more than one numbers at least up to 4. They have also learnt some alphabets and some words along with the alphabets.

But teacher very often teaches the sound of the alphabet. So let us see what is the importance of learning sound in this lesson 8 unit 2 “counting cats” 1 cat 2 cats brown cat, white cat 3 cats 4 cats Black cat, Red cat.

In this lesson cat becomes cats as because number has been changed from one to two three and four. A primary teacher has to teach about the conversation of cat to cats without teaching them singular and plural because it is too early to teach them about the number in English grammar.

Here sound plays crucial role in learning the conversation of cat to cats.

When a teacher lets their students or young learners to sound like sss. There be very happy to do so and lesson will become a very interactive and attractive.

And there brain will be more active to think creative and discover many new plural forms like pens, bags, books etc.

I have already taught my primary school teachers to teach the lesson like that and they have feed-backed me very positively about the learning outcome which I expected.

This is one kind of short pedagogy teaching a lesson or action research what I have done in my PTI.

So my suggestion is to give focus on sound to improve the English learning competency of primary school going students. If government supports me then I can write a book describing the pedagogical aspect of learning English in primary according to lesson and make some good research regarding this matter.

Mobin Uz Zaman is a Instructor (General), PTI, Nilphamari