Using a linguistic phonics reading method, with adults.
Recently, I received the immeasurable gift of chatting with a woman who’d come to That Reading Thing unable to read the word ‘is’. No one outside her immediate family knew her secret and, during her first TRT session, she wept just trying to articulate to her tutor that she couldn’t read or write. At Port Reach’s celebration evening, supported by her tutor, she stood in front of a roomful of people and told her story. By her own account, she … Read More
A taste of what can happen in a That Reading Thing lesson The Deal in That Reading Thing is: “you never have to know anything we haven’t learned together”. The flip side of The Deal is that students do need to know what we have learned together – and the result is often higher expectation than our students have ever experienced before. That high expectation is reflected in our choice of reading material. That Reading Thing intentionally tries to take … Read More
At That Spelling Thing, we believe every single secondary teacher, no matter what their subject, should have an easy to implement strategy for spelling in their classroom. A good strategy should capitalize on what students already know and remove the need for remembering every word by sight. Our unofficial motto is No More Look Cover Write Check! and we mean if from the bottom of our hearts. According to Professor Greg Brooks, the English code behaves predictably 77% of the time. … Read More
NEWS: Due to recent discussion around the inclusion of phonics in adult literacy, I thought I’d better mention that all lessons in both Part 1 and Part 2 of Literacy for Young Adults are age-appropriate linguistic phonics. It’s not about c-a-t says cat! Community literacy, offered in an informal one-to-one setting, is a powerful tool for people who are wary of classrooms – and that includes many people who have tried and failed to learn to read and spell in … Read More
NEWS: Due to recent discussion around the inclusion of phonics in adult literacy, I thought I’d better mention that all lessons in both Part 1 and Part 2 of Literacy for Young Adults are age-appropriate linguistic phonics. It’s not about c-a-t says cat! Community literacy, offered in an informal one-to-one setting, is a powerful tool for people who are wary of classrooms – and that includes many people who have tried and failed to learn to read and spell in … Read More
When people hear “phonics” they think “childish”, and not without reason. Most phonics programmes are childish, but not because they teach reading using the sounds and symbols of the language. They’re childish because they’re created for little children, emergent readers who have no history of trying and failing to learn to read. There are some wonderful programmes for little ones. The problem with using any teaching method intended for young children is that you automatically infantilise the learner no matter … Read More