A Reading-Based Approach Toward Teaching English At the Elementary School

The main objective in this study was to see if starting foreign language instruction from the elementary school was justifiable. to this end, a reading-based language teaching method was devised and then used in a primary school for a period of seven months. 170 primary school students (male and female) in five classes of grade 3 and 4 were taught english through this teaching program. results of the final evaluations indicated that all classes gained mean scores higher than the norm established by the study. in relation to different selected reading sub-skills, boys showed significantly higher performance in word meaning recognition and sentence and text comprehension. however, in making correct sound-symbol relationships, both sex groups had similar performance. on the basis of the findings, this study suggests reading-based english teaching at elementary schools to be started from grade 3 as one of the alternative teaching programs that the education organization can consider and put into practice.