December 10th, 2013

Dear diary, last weekend I attended a professional development conference. I learned how teachers can help bilingual students make a transition from Spanish to English. A good place to start teaching letter-sound correspondences in English are commonalities, this is, things that are similar in both languages. This diagram shows the English consonant sounds that also exist in Spanish. The speaker mentioned that the sounds that are in the following diagram provide a base for working with unfamiliar oral language. That these letters represent a good starting place for teaching Spanish speakers letter-sound correspondences in English. We could work with cluster similarities in both languages. For example, we could focus some activities in blends that both languages share such as pl (plural), pr (problem(a), bl (blanco, blend), tr (transport/transporte), dr (drama), cl (clear/claro), cr (crysta/cristal), gl (glacier/glacial), gr (gray/gris), fl (flower/flor), fr (fruit/fruta). He mentioned that after this point, we could talk about cognates.

p b t d k g m n f s w y ch l