The Importance of Reading in One’s Home Language

At BIS Hanoi, we never underestimate the importance of reading; not only are we developing the skills needed to read but also nurturing a love of books in all our students.

Many of our students are bilingual and it is widely known that a strong mother tongue is essential for further languages to develop. Therefore, reading in your home language is as equally important as reading in English.

There are several skills that we teach and develop as part of the journey in reading: decoding, fluency, sentence construction, prediction, inference, and reasoning. Today’s reading workshop for parents was an opportunity to share the approaches used at BIS Hanoi. As students learn to read, they decode and sound out words, over time they build up sight words and become able to read fluently, in both their mother tongue and English. However, we know reading is more than this. Understanding is key. We all need to understand clearly what we are reading and this was our focus today.

On November 9, Jasmine Reilly, Primary Literacy Coordinator ran a reading workshop for parents, it was delivered simultaneously in three languages; English, Vietnamese and Korean. By delivering this workshop in three languages we wanted our parents to have a deeper understanding of the approaches to reading at BIS and provide opportunities to ask questions. Sharing strategies will only serve our students better as they become more confident, proficient and passionate readers.

For parents, reading and using these skills in your home language is also crucial because we know that they can be transferred into other languages over time. Thank you to all parents who attended this workshop.