ABSTRACT
Schools have learnt, that any given group of children, mono-lingual or bi-lingual, is best helped with the realisation that they exist as individuals and, to this end, there is a need for differentiated teaching and learning strategies. The central aim of many reading schemes is to provide and build up a core of words that children can recognise in their readers and eventually in isolation, mainly by repetition of use, but gradually increasing in number and variety. The past tradition of teaching English as a foreign language was based on use of graded materials, often in withdrawal groups, using rote learning. With young children, the development of general concepts in their first language parallels what they are able to achieve in the language they are newly acquiring; and, of course, a mismatch will occur if the learning required in school is not meaningful. Grapho-phonic miscue is an area that teachers observe as occurring frequently with both mono and bi-lingual children.
