IHETC School
Reading and writing — Primary
The most common and most misread case: the child produces the sounds correctly, so the adult concludes they can read. In fact all their effort goes into decoding and none is left for meaning. Working on comprehension before reading is fluent is pointless — decoding must be automatic first.
What is at stake in this subject
Everything else depends on it. A child still decoding laboriously at the end of primary school will not understand a maths problem in secondary: the difficulty moves, and gets blamed on the wrong subject.
- Decoding and fluency
- Understanding a short text
- Vocabulary and word meaning
- Writing correct sentences
- Locating information in a text
They read, but do not understand what they read
The most common and most misread case: the child produces the sounds correctly, so the adult concludes they can read. In fact all their effort goes into decoding and none is left for meaning. Working on comprehension before reading is fluent is pointless — decoding must be automatic first.
How the tutor works on it
Very short daily sessions rather than long weekly ones: fluency comes from closely spaced repetition. The tutor has the child read aloud, then asks them to retell — and immediately spots the gap between the two.
- It changes angle when an explanation does not land
- It never gives an exercise answer
- It has the pupil check rather than correcting them
- It goes back to the missing prerequisite, even from an earlier year
Parents' questions
My child reads in French but we speak another language at home.
That is the situation of a large share of pupils, and not a handicap in itself: early bilingualism is a long-term asset. It does require more exposure to written French, and particular attention to vocabulary — that is where the gap opens, more than on decoding.