Supporting Reading When English Is an Additional Language

You do not need to speak fluent English at home to help your child learn to read in it. Phonics is a code, and supporting a child through it needs the sounds, five minutes, and someone who is not in a hurry. What your family already has, another language spoken well, is an advantage in this, not a complication. The steps below are the practical version: what to do on a Tuesday evening with a book bag, a tired child and twenty minutes before bed.

First, the thing everyone gets wrong

Speaking your home language is not slowing your child's English down. Children hold more than one language comfortably, and the strong vocabulary, grammar and storytelling they build in the language you speak best gives them something to hang English on. A child who can tell a detailed story in Polish, Urdu or Portuguese is a child who understands how stories work, and that understanding transfers.

So nothing in this article asks you to stop. Keep speaking, singing, arguing and telling family stories in the language that comes naturally. Do it more, if anything. The steps below sit alongside it.

Step 1. Get the programme name and the exact stage

English primary schools follow systematic synthetic phonics programmes, and the sounds are taught in a fixed order that differs from school to school. Everything else you do at home depends on knowing that order, so ask the teacher for two things: the name of the programme and the stage your child is on this half term.

Jolly Phonics, for example, teaches 42 sounds in seven groups, starting with Group 1, s a t i p n. Little Wandle maps its stages to school terms, so Reception Autumn 1 covers s a t p i n m d g o c k ck e u r h b f l. Read Write Inc talks about Sets. If you write the answer down exactly as it is given, you can always look the rest up later. For Jolly Phonics, the seven groups are listed here.

Step 2. Learn to say the sounds cleanly

This is the one part that genuinely repays ten minutes of your own practice, and it matters slightly more when English is not your first language, because a small habit gets copied.

Say each sound with no "uh" on the end. "mmm", not "muh". The parent guidance published for Essential Letters and Sounds divides them usefully: bouncy sounds, b d g k p and t, are said short and crisp, while stretchy sounds, m s f l n r v and z, are held. The reason is mechanical. "cuh-a-tuh" does not blend into cat, so a child who hears it that way is being handed a harder puzzle than the one on the page.

If your own accent shapes a sound differently, that is fine and normal. Use the school's sound mat, the school's video if there is one, or ask your child to show you, which most five year olds enjoy enormously.

Step 3. Separate the two things that look identical

When a child stops on a word, there are two quite different reasons, and the fix for one does nothing for the other.

Both are ordinary. The second one is more common for a child building English, and it is not a reading problem. Treating it as one, by making them sound the word out again, is a fast way to make reading feel like failure.

Step 4. Preview one or two words before you open the book

Look at the book for thirty seconds before your child does. If there is a word in it that you know they have never met, say it and explain it first, in whatever language does the job fastest. Two words is plenty. Three is a lesson.

Done before the reading, this takes ten seconds and removes a stumble. Done during the reading, the same explanation breaks the flow and the child loses the sentence. The order matters more than the content.

Step 5. Wait five seconds, then give sounds rather than words

The commonest home habit worth changing is helping too fast. Wait five seconds. Most children who are going to get there get there at about four, and the silence is doing the work.

When they genuinely cannot, do not say the word. Say the sounds, separately and cleanly: "s-t-o-p". That hands your child the win, because they still do the blending. Saying "stop" for them takes the win away and teaches them to wait for you.

Step 6. Tell them the tricky words and move on

Every programme has words that cannot be sounded out with the sounds taught so far. Little Wandle sends home is, I and the in the first half term. Read Write Inc calls them red words and tells children to stop and think rather than sound them out. Essential Letters and Sounds calls them harder to read and spell words.

When one of these appears and your child stalls, say it, let them carry on, and come back to it another day. There is no technique to apply. Trying to sound out the or said is not perseverance, it is a dead end, and children who are already working hard in a second language do not need a dead end.

Step 7. Cover the pictures

Guessing from the picture is the habit decodable books exist to prevent, and it is a particularly easy habit to fall into when a child has strong reasoning and a smaller English vocabulary. They look at the duck, they know the story wants a duck, they say "duck". It looks like reading and it is not.

Put your hand over the illustration for the line being read, then take it away and enjoy the picture together afterwards. If you want the full reasoning behind why the books look so plain, this explains it.

Your child is not learning to read twice. They are learning to read once, in a language they are still building.

Step 8. Keep reading aloud, and stop while they still want more

Reading aloud to a child does a completely different job from the child's own decoding practice. It builds vocabulary, comprehension and appetite, and it works from books far harder than anything they could decode themselves. Both tracks matter, and they are not in competition.

It does not have to be in English. A story told or read in your home language builds the same machinery: following a plot, holding characters in mind, meeting words for things that are not in the room. If you have English picture books and enjoy them, use those too. If reading aloud in English feels stiff, tell the story from the pictures instead, in your own words. Nobody is marking it.

And stop early. Five good minutes beats fifteen grim ones, every time. Stop at a point where your child is still enjoying it, even mid book, and the next session starts from a better place. If evenings have already become a battle, it is worth resetting deliberately rather than pushing through, and this covers how.

What to say to the teacher

Two sentences are enough: which language or languages you speak at home, and what you are seeing when you read together. Teachers are used to this and it helps them read your child's progress correctly, because a child who decodes accurately but pauses over meaning is a very different picture from one who cannot yet blend.

It is also worth knowing that the Year 1 phonics screening check, taken in June, is deliberately a test of decoding rather than of vocabulary. Twenty of the 40 words are made-up words printed beside a small alien, precisely so they cannot be recognised from memory or guessed from context. Whatever else is going on with English vocabulary, that check is asking about the code.

If something is genuinely worrying you, about hearing, speech or progress that seems to have stopped, the right move is to raise it with the class teacher rather than to sit with it. Ask what they see, and ask again in half a term.

Where this goes next

The pattern that works is unglamorous and repeatable: know the stage, say the sounds cleanly, wait five seconds, give sounds not words, tell them the tricky ones, cover the picture, stop early, and keep reading aloud in the language you love. None of it requires you to change how your family talks.

Lindo Phonics is not connected to Jolly Phonics, Little Wandle, Read Write Inc or Essential Letters and Sounds, and is not endorsed by them. We match the published progression so a story only uses sounds your child has already been taught.