How does IST teach reading in English and how much outside reading is required?
Children learn the skills of reading in the Pre-School programme and these skills are directly transferable between English and French / Spanish. However, whereas French / Spanish have a fairly direct relationship between spelling and pronunciation, such a link in English can appear to be arbitrary, especially to a learner. Therefore the IST P5 programme includes weekly sessions on whole-group reading in English using the Big Book approach. For students in the Arabic or Chinese programmes, some of the skills of reading are not as easily transferable to English and research shows that in fact different areas of the brain are used. However, these students do acquire the concepts and habits of reading, many of the skills of reading are common to all languages, and the Big Book approach in P5 ensures that these students are at the same level as their peers when entering Junior One. Outside reading in both languages studied is strongly encouraged and IST has a Library for this purpose; outs
