With the return of school and many families choosing french immersion (FI) for their children, I am receiving lots of questions about maintaining or supporting children’s english reading at home. I too have questions with my own daughter in a francophone school!
While I had some ideas on what this should look like, being the person who always wants evidence, I reached out to Dr. Renee Bourgoin, Faculty Associate at UNB and French Immersion subject coordinator for Anglophone West School District.
Here are her tips!
-It is important for FI students to continue being read to in English every night. Reading aloud to your child in English builds receptive language skills and vocabulary acquisition. Ask your child to track words with their fingers as you read aloud. This practice reinforces print skills such as word to word matching and word recognition - these skills are the same in english and French and transfer between languages.
- It is also important for FI students to continue reading English books at home. Talk, talk, talk about the book; the characters, the events, new information, etc. Work together at summarizing the books students read and the books they engage with during read alouds. Comprehension skills are the same in French and English so working on English comprehension will strengthen French comprehension skills and vice versa.
-Children only learn to read once. The act of learning to read occurs only once (ex: learning that we read a text from left to right; that punctuation plays a role when reading; that words carry meaning; that words can be decoded; that letters can be combined to make different sounds). For the most part, strategies such as looking at the initial sounds, chunking the word, fluency strategies and comprehension strategies are the same and simply cross over to other alphabetic languages.
- As reading abilities grow in one language (French), reading skills get stronger and cross over to other the other language (English).
- Phonics (that is, the way letters work together to make sounds) does differs from language to language. FI students will learn the French sounds necessary to read in French through classroom instruction. Although the classroom focus will be on acquiring the French sounds in the early years of French immersion, students will acquire many English sounds naturally through continued English reading at home. When practicing reading at home, you will naturally correct phonetic issues as they arise.
- Listen to your child read in French. Celebrate and encourage his/her efforts. Rather than ask your child to translate what he/she is reading, ask questions such as: What was your favorite part of the book? What page did you prefer? Which character is more like you? What did you learn? What words were easier for you to read? Abilities related to translation can be quite complexe.
