VoRTCS - Volunteer Refugee Tutoring & Community Support Program

Teaching literacy

Literacy is one of the most important skills that your students may need to learn. A basic ability to read and write is critical for navigating society, finding a job and following their dreams. Wherever possible, focus on teaching literacy to your students.

This can be done on a grand scale, such as by having a program to read a certain number of books in the next month and completing book reviews, or it can be done on a small scale, by aiming to read a book with your student each session.

Be sure not to use resources that have American spelling in them, as this may just confuse your students!

Teaching reading
There are two different aspects to reading – you reading to the students, and them reading to you.

Besides the great variety of resources available in the VoRTCS library, you will also find enough picture story books in your local council library to find something that your students would like you to read to them. It’s important that the students hear your voice reading to them in English, and it will not only encourage them to read themselves, but help with all aspects of their English development, from grammar to pronunciation.

You should also encourage your student to read to you every week. Many students find reading difficult and will try to wriggle out of it -don't give in! It may be that you need to let them choose a non-fiction or picture story book that interests them, and have them read every second line while you read the rest.

Teaching writing
While reading is a very important skill, it should be taught in conjunction with writing skills where possible. Teachers often report that refugee students’ writing skills are letting them down. Even students with confident, fluent spoken English struggle to get words down correctly.

Practice is the key to helping in this area. Most of the worksheets have a focus on the student’s writing ability, but it’s good to compliment these by encouraging them to write stories, letters, cards, book reports, songs and poems.

Students might want to write a letter to a parent, teacher or friend, write a story pretending they are a character from a book, or cut a picture from a magazine and write about it (this can be a great activity for even younger students can do this, just writing a sentence or even a word). You might need to stress that making mistakes doesn’t mater, as long as words are getting down on the page.

Teaching handwriting
Handwriting is also a major problem for some refugee students, particularly those who have not had any schooling prior to coming to Australia. Writing may be difficult to pick up where the student missed the lower years of education and doesn’t have fine motor skills. You may need to start with simple activities to build up fine motor skills, and work up from there.

A few tricks to improve handwriting include tracing, coloring and completing mazes (getting them to do a maze without their pencil touching the sides is a good one!). But practice is the key!

It is much easier for the students to write on lined paper, and paper where the spaces between the lines are big, especially for those students who are young or have a very low level of English.

You should also be alert for common mistakes that may occur as a result of your student’s first language, eg in Arabic the script flows from right to left.

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