Using a linguistic phonics reading method with adults.
Ghoti spells Fish. This thing still shows up on social media and still makes me sigh heavily for two reasons: 1. It still gets used by literacy professionals as ‘proof’ that the English language is ‘not phonetic’. Of course, we’re honest that English has a complex written code. There are a lot of ways to represent the sounds that we say. However – and this is a big deal for teen and adult literacy learners – the language is most … Read More
There are two phrases we ask That Reading Thing tutors to avoid: Sound it out Break it down Why? Because our students have heard these two phrases their whole school lives and have no idea what they mean. The analogy I give is learning to build my first website. I started with the WordPress platform because I’d read about their ‘famous 5-minute install’. Brilliant! There were no YouTube demo videos back then so I found the simplest instructions for the … Read More
We’re often asked what decodable readers we recommend and the answer is ‘none’. This is because the vast majority of TRT learners, even those who are working slowly through the *Foundation levels, are not beginning readers. They all come with some sight words so there’s no reason to limit those in text. They usually know all the basic alphabet sounds for both reading and writing and can work with multisyllabic words from the first lesson. That Reading Thing is structured … Read More
This post was written in response to the first viewing of the DfE’s subject content document for Functional Skills English reforms published in 2017. I wrote it with no idea that I’d be involved in the creation of the ETF’s Post-16 Phonics Approaches. It’s a joy to look back at my “ideal world of phonics for adults” and see that we managed to fit quite a lot of it into the toolkit. ******************************** My biggest fear about formalising phonics with … Read More
As I travel around the FE world I’m hearing that people have looked at the Post-16 Phonics Toolkit but haven’t necessarily read it. If that’s you, here’s a quick tour based around the chapter people are most concerned about. Chapter 11 is called “Turning the FSE word lists into a learning tool” It encourages FS teachers not to teach lists but to develop vocabulary for both reading and spelling. The chapter is a bit of a beast, but these six … Read More
Do you work in a post-16 setting? In 2018, I had the wonderful experience of working with a team of authors with extraordinary expertise in adult education.Together we wrote the toolkit (link below) and created trainings for professionals in the world of post-16 literacy. There are so many unique settings in the field and the toolkit can flex to work in any of them. It is based on the linguistic phonics principles which underpin That Reading Thing but it also … Read More
