I would like to offer the following four teaching strategies that will contribute to your students success in developing early literacy. Make Literature Comprehensible for Students Literature provides a meaningful context in which to help students understand how a language works. Select literature titles that match your overall objectives for your students, not titles solely targeted at the language level for which the books were written. To increase students understanding of the literature selections and provide what Stephen Krashen refers to as comprehensible input, take concrete examples of language from the selection and develop or expand on them for students. For preproduction students, books with good illustrations provide the visual stimulus students need for comprehension.
Students can easily read the pictures as the story develops.
It also is helpful to select books with illustrations in close proximity to the text. This helps beginning students to better recognize the relationship between the words and pictures and to increase comprehensible input. Depending on students interests and skills, the same literature selection may be used to explore different language structures and ideas. For instance, to introduce a unit on farm animals, you might select a book like Old MacDonald Had a Farm. For beginning students, show pictures of a farm, a farmer, and farm animals or have students create a mini-farm diorama in the classroom.