The Approaches to Teaching Persian Writing Skill to Primary School Students

Document Type : Original Article

Author

Assistant Professor in Linguistics, Farhangian University, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

There are two main approaches to teaching writing skill to children: the sound-based approach and word-based approach. In alphabetic or phonics approach which is one of the oldest and known methods, writing / reading teaching begins with the teaching of individual sounds to children.  In contrast, in the word-based approach, the teaching of the writing system begins by reading and writing the words. While introducing these two common approaches to writing spelling skills, this paper attempts to compare the advantages and disadvantages of each one by providing evidence from Persian and English languages. Proponents of the traditional, alphanumeric style believe that this method brings phonological awareness to learners, which helps them to read the meaningless and new words. The advocates of the rival method, the word-based method, believe that in the teaching of reading, the focus should be on the whole word, because the whole word is a semantic unit and the purpose of reading is also the discovery of meaning. They claim that children in this way can discover the phonological values of letters later in a process of self-discovery. Evidence of English and Persian indicates that skilled readers use a word-based approach.

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