English Literacy for Spanish Speakers

 

English Literacy for Spanish Speakers: Fisher Hill has an excellent English Literacy Program for Spanish-speaking teens and adults.

 The First Step in the program is to use English Reading and Spelling for the Spanish Speaker Book 1.

This book was written to help Spanish speakers learn how to read and write in English.  It uses a systematic approach in teaching the English speech sounds and provides practice with phonemic awareness, which is the ability to identify individual sounds and their order within words.  Learning the different speech sounds will help students read and write in English fluently.  Eighty-five percent (85%) of words in English are phonetic.  This book also presents many of the small, commonly used words, called sight words, that are not phonetic.

The book is bilingual since the word list for each lesson is presented in English and Spanish. There are pictures to go with many of the words in the lists. Each lesson emphasizes one or two new speech sounds. The vowel sounds in English are different than those in Spanish, but many of the English consonant sounds are similar to those in Spanish. There are 26 letters in the English alphabet:

Upper Case

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Lower Case

a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z

The five vowels letters are a, e, i, o, u. All the other letters are consonants. Most consonants make one sound except for c, g, s, and x. These letters have two sounds. Vowels make more than one sound. There are a total of fifteen vowel sounds. Sometimes the letter “y” is used as a vowel. Words are made up of syllables (units of pronunciation). Some words are made up of one syllable, while others have two or more syllables. Every syllable must have a vowel.

Each lesson’s word list begins with words that contain the speech sound that is being emphasized in that lesson. The last word or words in the list are sight words.

Practicing English speech sounds, sight words, and their spellings will help the Spanish speaker learn English reading and spelling.

Visit our website at www.Fisher-Hill.com to learn more about the First Step in our English Literacy Program for Spanish-speaking teens and adult. Sample pages from English Reading and Spelling for the Spanish Speaker Books 1-6 can be viewed from our website.