ABC FACTS OF LIFE
The ROLE of assessment is crucial to ANY instruction
PRIOR TO INSTRUCTION
- Teachers need to determine students’ actual basic letter-sound knowledge.
- What are the concepts to establish before starting the lessons?
- If this is not done, time and effort will be spent on already-known material.
- Students lose self-confidence when facing an ambiguous English-only example.
- The English-only focus shifts efforts from ABC progress to ESL learning, causing delays in literacy.
Teachers must discover which letter sounds the student already knows. Which sounds the student does not know is also guided by this information. Teachers should never assume students do not English letter sounds. They only need to teach the symbols, “A”,”B”,”C”, etc. which represent the individual sounds.
Phonics for Latinos - ABCs in Common 