Remedial English
A student in Grade 11 working at Grade 5 level cannot be helped by Grade 11 material delivered more slowly. Something has to be rebuilt.
First, find the real gap
Remedial teaching fails most often because it starts in the wrong place. The student is given easier Grade 11 work, which is still far beyond them, and the failure repeats.
Spend one lesson finding out what the student can actually do. Twenty minutes of diagnosis saves a term of misdirected effort.
- Can they read aloud? Give a simple paragraph. Listen for decoding, not comprehension. A student who cannot read the words has a different problem from one who reads them and understands nothing.
- Can they understand what they read? Two simple questions on the same paragraph.
- Can they write a sentence? Write three sentences about your family. Look at whether there is a verb, a subject, a capital and a full stop.
- Do they have any vocabulary? Point at ten common objects. Ten out of ten and ten out of thirty are very different starting points.
- Can they hear English? Say a simple sentence and ask them to repeat it. A student who cannot repeat cannot yet learn from listening.
Rebuilding, in order
Do not skip a stage because the student is fifteen and the material looks childish. Use adult contexts, but do not skip the stage.
Sounds and letters
If reading aloud fails, this is where you start. Letter-sound correspondences, then blending. It is slow and it is unavoidable.
A core of words
Two or three hundred of the commonest words, recognised instantly. These words make up a very large share of any English text, and a student who has to decode them can never read fluently.
The simple sentence
Subject, verb, object. The boy kicked the ball. Build, expand and vary this one pattern until it is secure.
The present and the past
Two tenses, no more, until both are reliable. Everything else can wait, and a student with two secure tenses can communicate.
Joining sentences
And, but, because, so. Four words that turn a list of statements into writing.
Then, and only then, the syllabus
Once the foundation holds, syllabus material becomes possible. Attempting it earlier wastes both the student's time and yours.
Keeping the student in the room
The hardest part of remedial teaching is not academic. A student who has failed at English for six years has usually decided that they cannot do it, and that decision is doing more damage than any gap in their knowledge.
Some things that help, none of which are complicated:
- Give work they will succeed at, on the first day. Success is the only thing that reopens a closed mind, and it must come immediately.
- Do not correct everything. Correct one thing. A page returned covered in red confirms what they already believe.
- Show them the distance travelled. Keep their first piece of work. Show it to them after two months. This is more persuasive than any encouragement you can offer.
- Never do it in front of the class. Remedial work should be private. A student marked out publicly as needing it will refuse it.
- Use adult and age-appropriate contexts. A fifteen-year-old reading about a cat and a mat has been humiliated, whatever the level is right for.
- Be patient with the pace, not with the effort. Slow is fine. Not trying is not, and the distinction matters — it treats the student as capable.
Fifteen minutes, three times a week
Remedial work is more effective in short, frequent sessions than in long ones. Fifteen minutes three times a week beats an hour on Saturday, for reasons of attention as much as memory.
If a full remedial programme is impossible in your circumstances, fifteen minutes before school, three days a week, will still produce visible change within a term.