How to Teach the Latin Alphabet

The Latin alphabet may be used around the world, but that doesn't mean everyone knows it. If you teach English or another European language, you'll probably need to teach the Latin alphabet at some point. Singing the alphabet song and drawing t's shaped like trees won't cut it for most adult learners, though. Instead, try this adult-friendly way to teach the Latin alphabet.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Cursive writing worksheets
• Simple, fast-paced reading activities

Get Students Familiar With the Letters

1. Introduce the shapes and sounds of the Latin alphabet. Give your students a list of all the letters. This should include an example word, such as "a" as in apple, and an explanation of the pronunciation, such as the letters' International Phonetic (IPA) symbols. Read through all the letters once as a class.

2. Teach your students to recognize the letters. Five letters each lesson will work for almost anyone, although many can go faster. To practice, hand out a few lines of text and ask your students to mark certain letters. Have them scan short lists to find, say, words with two e's or no m's. Remember to work on both capitals and lower cases. Spell any words you can with the letters you have and use them for reading practice.

3. Work on writing. You can do this at the same time you teach letter reading. For some learners, it's easier to remember the letters shapes after they've written them a few times. Let students first trace letters then write them based on an examples. Give your students simple words to write, such as bed or cab.

Practice Using the Alphabet

4. Do transliterations. If you can, type up some words in the language you're teaching using the students' native alphabet. Since English spelling isn't phonetic, stick with words your students already know. Ask the students to transliterate the words back into the Latin alphabet. Let the students know if they got the sounds right, but the spelling is wrong, such as "kat" instead of "cat." If you think your students misspelled something because they confused two sounds, such as "bad" and "bed," just ask them to say the word.

5. Teach the cursive version of the Latin alphabet. In the same way you taught the printed alphabet, teach your students to read and write cursive. Since they already know the letter shapes, you can now teach more letters per lesson. Once they have a good grasp on reading cursive, provide examples of natural handwriting. Real handwriting is rarely as neat as the examples in textbooks.

6. Improve your students' reading speed. Your students will read better with practice, but there's a lot you can do to make things easier. Competitions are especially useful. Show the class a word they don't know and see who can sound it out the fastest. Do vocabulary relay races using flash cards. Use timed scanning activities, such as scanning a list of words to find all the nouns or items of clothing.

Tips & Warnings

• Look at resources for teaching children. You don't need to make your class of business executives sing the alphabet song, but a lot of the letter recognition and writing worksheets kids use can help you teach the Latin alphabet to learners of any age.
• People of different backgrounds learn the Latin alphabet at different rates. It's generally easier for someone familiar with a similar alphabet like Cyrillic or Greek than for someone who reads and writes only Arabic or Chinese.
• Transliteration is useful in the beginning, but don't overdo it or your students could learn to pronounce words incorrectly.

Resources

• Get worksheets and activities for teaching the alphabet.
• Find ESL alphabet lessons at TeachersDesk.com.
• The early childhood worksheets here are good for adult learners, too.
• These alphabet games that can be adapted to the ESL classroom.
• Explore these links to Latin alphabet teaching ideas.