- BACKGROUND: The student’s name is Minh. She’s 6 years old. She has learnt Vietnamese alphabet at school. The English teacher tutors her at home. The purpose of the lesson is to teach the student recognize each letter in the alphabet.

- PROBLEM: In order to help Minh easily remember the alphabet, the teacher read aloud all the alphabet first and ask her to repeat each letter. Then the teacher taught her to sing the alphabet song. Minh could sing the song as clearly and exactly as the teacher did, but the problem was that she could not recognize the form and the sound of some letters such as “j, q, h, e”

- SOLUTIONo Firstly, the teacher showed all the letters on the white board,

pointing to each letter in order while singing the Alphabet song with the student. Then he asked Minh to sing the song alone. Minh could sing the song clearly and exactly. Then he pointed randomly to a letter, asking Minh to read aloud that letter but she couldn’t recognize four letters: j, h, q, e. The teacher decided to ask Minh repeat 10 times for each letter. She could read aloud that letter at that time but when the teacher moved to the other letters and then reviewed the whole alphabet by reading aloud any letter and asked Minh to show her that letter. Minh just confused letter “i” with letter “e” and couldn’t recognize letter j, h, q again. Minh confused letter “e” with letter “i”, maybe because the sound /i:/ of the letter “e” is similar to that of letter “i” in Vietnamese. Likewise, letter “j, h, q” are a little bit hard to pronounce and unfamiliar in Vietnamese.

o The teacher tried to find another way by using tracing letter alphabet word sheet. He asked Minh to trace and read aloud the letter at the same time. It was disappointed as Minh still couldn’t recall the correct letter.

o Then the teacher used picture to associate the letter with an image of a subject. For example, the teacher said A for apple, B for ball, ….E for elephant,…. with the picture showing along. Then still the student could only say them in order.

o The teacher decided to try games and activity to help the student recognize letters. The teacher had the child make the letter out of clay, pipe cleaners, finger print and play a game of forming the letter with her body. The teacher found out that Minh was very excited and she could recall the letter correctly as she was playing a game. Then teacher asked the student to spell her name, her family member’s names.

o Write a series of words on a piece of paper. For example: English, egg, sing, eat, boy. Ask the child to circle all the words that contain the letter e. She could do this quickly and correctly.

o Now the teacher play another game giving the child letter card and having her place the card in the alphabet to make sure she remembered all the letters. Luckily, she made it.

Results: The teacher realize that the student at this age can learn best through games and physical activities rather than ask them to repeat one thing. Although they can follow it, it does not mean they can really understand it. The teacher are also aware that Minh has kinesthetic learning style which made games and physical activities easier for her to remember things.