[roja123]

I give private lessons to an eight year old girl to reinforce what is covered in her English lessons at school. I use her school text book as a guide and develop activities from that.

The school syllabus is extremely intense. She has no problem remembering vocabulary but understanding and recalling sentences is a big difficulty for her. She's not ready for them yet, but we have to do what's covered in school. What can I do to help her?

I suspect she may have general literacy difficulties as she does not understand for instance that a question mark or even questioning intonation indicates a question. She learns to spell everything by rote with little understanding of letters and their sounds, e.g. she can't pick up on words where the beginning letter or sound is provided for her. She also has no concept of pronouns and whether or not they refer to herself. We use a male and female doll in the class to model other people, but the information is forgotten by the next lesson. There may simply be huge differences in the way literacy skills are taught here that I don't know about yet and need to get my head round.

I wonder if anyone here has used any techniques for teaching sentences. So far I've been teaching entire phrases, but would you recommend word order exercises? Any other ideas?

I'd really value any ideas, as I want to to do my very best for this student and help her reach her full potential. Thanks!