My introduction to EFL Kingdom

I was trained as a TESOL / TESL teacher, which means I'd be teaching secondary school students who'd have some exposure to English in their daily lives, be it through television, at home, etc. However, the actual situation is so far from the ideal. I am teaching in a semi-rural school where the students have very little exposure to English. None, perhaps. All those 'theories' I had learnt at uni about not using the L1 in the classroom, etc could not be applied in this situation. Among the things I did not expect are:

• I find myself speaking the Malay Language 90% of the time, in an English classroom.
• Students' limited vocabulary, even at Secondary Five (final year of high school). I had to explain the meanings of words such as 'lunch', 'breakfast', 'small', 'large', 'coconut' and so on. 
• Students' lack of knowledge of even the basic sight words such as 'here', 'he', 'she', etc. Students get confused between 'he' and 'here'; 'the', 'there' and 'they', etc.
• Most students are very very shy and reluctant to read aloud, because they do not really know how to pronounce the words.
• Students' inability to write a simple sentence in English correctly. The word order is all jumbled up, so much so that the sentence is unintelligible. Even the words used may not seem to be English words sometimes...

This situation has forced me to reconsider some of the ideas I have, and made me aware of lacks in my own knowledge. 

1. What does it mean to be able to read?

    From my own experience as a reader, reading involves auditory as well as sensory processing - recognising the spelling of the word, for example, and knowing how it sounds like, as well as what the word means. However, I don't seem to know very much about what it means to be able to read. I did learn about the subskills involved, such as skimming and scanning, guessing meaning from context, etc. But I suppose these subskills cannot be applied if the students can't even understand English at word level...  Again, back to my question: What does it mean to be able to read? How does one learn to read (from scratch)? How does a FL learner acquire the semantics, phonology and syntax of the language? 

I have had wonderful suggestions about the need to teach phonics, and I do agree. I can't possibly be there forever to teach my students how to pronounce every single word...

I do notice that knowing how a word sounds like is very much linked to being able to spell it. Perhaps the lack of knowledge of pronunciation is what leads to students getting confused between 'the', 'they' and 'there'. When they see the written form, they are not able to recognise which is which. 'Want' and 'one' is another example of confusion faced by students, perhaps also due to not knowing how the word is pronounced. 

However, again, I find my knowledge very much lacking in this area. This is something I need to improve on in order to help my students. 

That's it for today. I would really appreciate your constructive feedback and suggestions.