Difficulties experienced by beginner readers quiz

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• • Culturally bound nature of meaning • Limited vocabulary limits ability to guess meaning • Lack of experience of genre • Lack of experience of idiom or register
• • Learner lacks innate knowledge of structure of language so cannot predict that the next word might be a verb, article, etc. • Syntax likely to be different in learner's other languages • Punctuation might be different in learner's other languages • Beginner readers and writers of English will have no/limited familiarity with written syntax
• • English is not phonetically regular • Difficulty with homophones, e.g. there/their and homonyms, e.g. read/read • May have sounds that don't exist/are different in their other languages (/p/b/, /b/v/, etc.) • May have Roman script but the letters represent different sounds
• • Learners not familiar with Roman script may not recognise different fonts, print, upper/lower case, layout, etc. • If a learner has very low level of literacy in own language/is literate in a phonetically regular script, they may not have transferable skills in terms of pattern recognition