PHONICS AS IMPROVEMENT OF LINGUISTIC ATTITUDES AND READING FLUENCY TO SATISFY DIVERSITY IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING

The pandemic has determined a new way of learning. Students from early stages have developed self-learning of those contents which were guided traditionally. Reading in foreign language learning is one of those types of contents. Reading is one of the four necessary important language skills for those who learn English as a second language. The main learning difficulty of Reading for Spanish-native primary students is to solve the gap between Reading and Writing being visual skills. In doing so, it is necessary to take into consideration reading sub-skills which are specific behaviours that language users do in order to read effectively. Spanish-native students of Primary Education try to read aloud English language according to the way in which they write with some learning difficulties such as the pronunciation of vowels and consonants, digraphs (two letters which perform one sound) or dipthongs. Thus, reading fluency directly influences on linguistic attitudes towards learning a foreign language by its difficulties which stay in pronunciation patterns. Learning pronunciation of English has two phases: 1.Learning to discriminate. 2. Learning to produce. Then, all reading programs should contain a self-learning component based on the development of phonemic awareness which makes the student more capable to solve reading difficulties on their own. Students who learn phonics early do better in reading than those who do not. Early stages of learning a foreign language such as Primary Education should work on Reading through a phonics method being the main aims of this methods the grapheme/word recognition, word comprehension and finally segmenting and blending of syllables. However, we must remark on the need of phonemic awareness to improve phonics. Phonemic awareness focuses only on the sounds of a word while phonics focuses on the relationship of sounds and letters. Therefore, learning of reading fluency especially covers phonics exercises according to students’ needs in order to satisfy inclusion in foreign language learning by making students autonomous. Notwithstanding, there are different types of phonics methods to satisfy diferent learning styles and paces. Finally, we make a proposal of phonics components to take into account when students in Primary Education learn Foreign Language Reading on their own in order to foster linguistic attitudes and inclusion of any student in pandemic times. Then, the main goal of this paper is to describe a set of phonics contents and exercises to improve linguistic attitudes and reading skills in foreign language learning. Therefore, reading linguistic skill usually acts in a guided teaching (Bartan, 2017) but in pandemic times the self-learning that children from early stages have tested determines a new path where it is crucial the approximation, maturing and improvement of the reading-writing process by planning phonics contents from early stages. Therefore, we remark on these conclusions as implications for research regarding inclusion and attention to diversity in learning contexts during pandemic times. So, this is the end of the conference paper. Thank you very much for your attention. Hope you find interesting.