DIAMOND Hunt: A reading teaching approach for EFL beginners' reading skills development

Abstract

Phonics and whole language (WL) are two major approaches to teaching beginning reading, and skills and meaning are their respective emphases. However, because of children’s learning styles and diverse English abilities, neither phonics nor WL efficiently improves the development of beginners’ English reading skills. This study focused on a reading teaching approach, which I have called DIAMOND hunt, and its use with Taiwanese first graders as EFL beginners. DIAMOND hunt consists of two main components: Dual Interactive Approach, which keeps phonics skills and meaning-based reading together, and Mixed-ability coOperative Novices Design, which groups beginners with diverse English abilities in a learning group. It aims to guide the beginners to treasure reading abilities and successfully develop the reading skills. By DIAMOND hunt, children were first grouped heterogeneously based on their English abilities. Then they were asked to collaboratively accomplish given tasks that aimed at encouraging students to use their phonics and word recognition skills in meaning-based reading. The results showed that this teaching approach, DIAMOND hunt, was helpful for children’s English reading skills and could stimulate their motivation for learning to read. Future research directions were also addressed in the conclusion.