It happened about 17 years ago. I took home some decoding cards to prepare a lesson for ESOLI class. One of the pictures showed a watermelon with the letter S at the bottom. And there I was, staring at a watermelon like a deer in the headlights, trying to figure out the connection between the watermelon and the sound the letter S makes. The best I could come up with was S is for sweet and S for slice.”
My 10-year-old daughter (a native English speaker) ran up to me, looked at the picture, and said, “Mom, S is for seed!” She pointed at the picture and added, “This is called a seed!” Of course, I knew the word seed, but that word would never naturally occur to me, and I doubted any of my newcomers knew that word. They probably knew student, sleep, and Sonic, but …seed? Truth be told, I wondered if any of my students would find those cards truly helpful. I knew from personal experience as a language learner and a language teacher that learning to read as a secondary ML was different from learning to read as a native speaker of English or an elementary student.
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