I think that teaching the child how to pronounce random collections of letters, is likely to be helpful, if the child has not already been given a good basis in phonics.
At the point where the letters, and particularly the letter combinations, are pronounced differently than they are for English words, it probably ceases to be useful – unless the child has developed an unwillingness to use phonic methods in English, in which case learning that phonic methods can be used to read would itself be a worthwhile exercise.
On the other hand, if your cousin really wants to teach her friend Spanish, so she has someone to talk to and practice with … well, single parents often relate to their kids like that, but I don’t think the Spanish would be helpful with the reading.
I teach English in Taiwan, including teaching kindergarten children to read English. They are concurrently learning to read in Chinese as well.
I wouldn’t do it if the purpose is to try to use that to help the kid learn to read. The amount of work required to teach Spanish vocabulary easily is 50 times as much work as helping her just learn to read English better.
Not all kids get reading right away. No brilliant children are off the top of the charts in all subjects.
There are tons and tons of resources online about techniques for teaching children to read, including readers which have only short vowel sounds or only long vowel sounds.
Jackie needs to read to her. Daily. This will help.
My daughter was slow to read, also. I bought a book entitled, The Writing Road to Reading. The theory was you learn to read by writing. I don’t remember the techniques. This was 35 years ago.
I was really surprised to learn (from my sister, as she’s trying to teach her kid how to read) that these days not everyone teaches phonics, which I think is an utter mistake – after watching my kids learn how to read, I am a firm believer that (unless the child is very bright and can figure it out on her own) you have to start with a firm foundation in phonics. I did the “random collection of letters” trick with my kids when they were learning to read. They loved it, and it really cemented to them that phonics was a thing.
Letters don’t make sounds. Letters represent sounds. People make sounds, using a language that they have naturally learned without the involvement of print. Phonics draws upon this to make a bridge between the language a learner already knows and reading, which is an entirely different (and unnatural) cognitive process. Furthermore, to become a proficient reader, the learner must be able to eventually move away from phonics, or he or she will be stuck in subvocalization. Learners make this move in a nonanalytical way–IOW, they aren’t engaging in some kind of metacognitive process to do this.
People seem to think that “sounding out words” is learning new language, and is the end goal of reading, but it’s not–it’s just a bridge, and it especially wouldn’t work with English orthography if that’s all there were to it. English-speaking children are (usually) able to move beyond that despite the extensive variation in the origins of Engish spelling, which makes patterns of correlation widely erratic. No one would ever be able to read if phonics were the equivalent of reading, especially speakers of languages like Chinese, which is represented by pictograpghs.
So to learn to read Spanish before English would not only require that the child already speak Spanish, but wouldn’t obviate the inherent challenges of learning English. Research does show cognitive advantages to (truly) bilingual education, and I would bet that it would indeed help, but it’s not clear if that’s what this parent is considering.
Learning Latin made me a much better English speaker, because Latin grammar is typically caught using English comparisons (e.g., “in English we say, “in order to,” while in Latin we use ut plus the subjunctive…”). I’m not sure if learning French and Spanish helped.
I’d be curious to know what you mean by “better speaker.” Do you mean that you were making grammatical errors when speaking English, and that your Latin teacher (or Latin textbook) corrected you? Or do you mean that your Latin teacher taught you more eloquent ways of speaking? How did you actually change your English speaking because of Latin? Can you remember any examples of specific changes?
Or do you mean that your Latin lessons gave you an analytical awareness to the English grammar which you already spoke more or less correctly without thinking about it?
We live in Montreal and were totally fluent in English, as much as any 5 year old is. The thing is that the French immersion school requested that we not teach them to read English before they had learned to read French. But I don’t it made the least difference. As adults, they are bilingual, although they are fairly rusty since they all left Montreal. Actually, they all live in the US.
I should have said a better writer. I’m not sure if it affected my speech. But learning Latin made me think about sentence structure and other things that I never thought about otherwise because I’m a native English speaker, and that made me improve my sentence structure. It also made me better at spelling words since I was more likely to recognize the underlying suffixes and the like.
Cool, but I’m not sure what this has to do with kindergarten children learning to read.
For the OP, something else to note:
Many parents aren’t particularly good at teaching their kids, so it’s something to be aware of. This is especially for those who have artificially high expectations of their kids as they don’t have the necessary patience.