Remedial Teaching in English — REET Notes

What is Remedial Teaching?

Remedial Teaching is special-purpose teaching given to students who are not reaching the expected level through normal classroom instruction. Its goal is to identify and remove their specific difficulties — not to separate them from the class or expose their weakness.

Remedial teaching is always built on diagnostic testing — first the child's specific difficulty (pronunciation, sentence structure, vocabulary, and so on) is identified, and only then is the remedy designed around it.

The remedial teaching cycle

This cycle shows that remedial teaching is never based on guesswork — it always starts from diagnosis.

Effective strategies

Remedial teaching draws on several strategies together — peer support, a reward scheme to encourage effort, and regular feedback to the student, the parent and the teacher alike. No single strategy on its own is considered sufficient.

Tasks are always sequenced from simple to difficult, and the focus stays on generic, foundational language skills (such as basic sentence structure) so the child can eventually learn independently.

Online remedial teaching

Online remedial teaching offers real advantages — children can learn at a flexible pace, time and place stop being obstacles, and a well-designed course makes finding information easy. It is also generally considered cost-effective, since it works out cheaper than repeated one-on-one in-person sessions.

Common remedial-teaching techniques

The Multisensory Approach (commonly abbreviated VAKT — Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic, Tactile) is considered one of the most effective remedial techniques — the child learns a word by seeing it (visual), saying and hearing it (auditory), writing it by hand (kinesthetic), and tracing it in sand or raised letters (tactile), all at once, which strengthens memory.

For pronunciation and spelling difficulties, phonics-based remediation works well — the child is taught to break a word down letter by letter and connect it to its sound, rather than simply memorising the whole word by rote.

Individualized attention and peer tutoring are also used together — practising in small groups at a child's own pace gives better results than moving the entire class forward at a single, uniform speed.

Common language difficulties and their remedies

The same remedy isn't given for every difficulty — the strategy is chosen based on the diagnosis.

The Diagnostic-cum-Remedial Teaching (DCRT) approach

In Indian teacher training, the widely used Diagnostic-cum-Remedial Teaching (DCRT) approach treats diagnosis not as a one-time test but as a continuous part of the teaching process itself — the teacher keeps identifying children's difficulties during regular classroom teaching and takes small corrective steps immediately, rather than waiting for a big test at the end of the term before starting any remedy.

In this approach, the teacher plays a dual role — both as the one who teaches and as the one who continuously diagnoses, so that no child's difficulty is left unnoticed for too long.

How remedial teaching is evaluated

A single big test is not considered enough to judge the success of remedial teaching — instead, continuous and formative assessment is used, such as short weekly quizzes, oral checks and portfolios (a collection of the child's work), to track gradual progress.

Evaluation also looks at whether the child has genuinely improved in real language use — speaking and writing in class — and not just on a test, because the ultimate goal of remedial teaching is not higher marks but enabling the child to use language independently.

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