In this practical guide to teaching beginning language leaners of all ages, Calhoun encourages us to begin—with their developed listening and speaking vocabularies and other accumulated knowledge about the world. Engage students in shaking words out of a picture—words from their speaking vocabularies—to begin the process of building their reading and writing skills. Use the picture word inductive model (PWIM) to teach several skills simultaneously, beginning with the mechanics of forming letters to hearing and identifying the phonetic components of language, to classifying words and sentences, through forming paragraphs and stories based on observation.