Creating Learning Partners: A facilitator’s guide for training effective adult literacy tutors

STEP-BY-STEP PROCESS

Remind tutors of the important cautions about teaching phonics (see the introduction to this activity). Tell them that they can use phonics to teach beginning and intermediate readers how to decode unknown words and that the following exercises are examples of phonics instruction. Another way to teach phonics is to include it in a spelling program (see Unit 8, Spelling).
First example: Ask tutors to look around the room and name everything that ends with the letter s. Ask tutors to name other words that end in the letter s. Tutors can use this exercise with beginning sounds, blends or ending sounds when working with a learner.
Second example: Tutors can teach word families to help learners who have difficulty hearing vowel sounds. Write the words in the word family at on the flip chart (for example, cat, mat, bat, rat) and ask tutors to make as many rhyming words as they can by just changing the first sound of the word.
Third example: Have a list of words on cards from two or three word families. Tutors sort the cards into the correct piles of similar word families. For example: sing, ring, thing; rash, splash, flash.
Review the handout Tips for Phonemic Awareness and Phonics. Ask tutors how they would use phonemic awareness and phonics in a tutoring session, based on information from the handout.

Activity D

Cloze

Cloze is an exercise that helps readers learn to predict words in a text by using context. In the exercise, predictable words are left out from text. Cloze can also be used to practise vocabulary in text.

Use of handouts, work alone and in pairs, discussion
Materials and equipment Handout 6.4: The Laundromat Handout 6.5: Creating Cloze Text Samples of reading material Correction fluid Preparation Copy handouts and reading passages for tutors. STEP-BY-STEP PROCESS Give tutors a copy of The Laundromat and ask them to fill in the blanks. When they are finished, ask tutors what strategies they used to determine the missing words. For example, their knowledge of the world helped them know that the second missing word is week. Their knowledge of grammar and context helped them with other words. Demonstrate how some of the blanks could have more than one correct word, based on a person’s background experience. Pass out the handout Creating Cloze Text. Ask tutors to choose one of the samples of text and use the correction fluid to cover up predictable words. Then ask them to work in pairs and to read each other’s text.

Use of handouts, work alone and in pairs, discussion

Materials and equipment

Handout 6.4: The Laundromat
Handout 6.5: Creating Cloze Text
Samples of reading material
Correction fluid

Preparation

Copy handouts and reading passages for tutors.

STEP-BY-STEP PROCESS

Give tutors a copy of The Laundromat and ask them to fill in the blanks.
When they are finished, ask tutors what strategies they used to determine the missing words. For example, their knowledge of the world helped them know that the second missing word is week. Their knowledge of grammar and context helped them with other words. Demonstrate how some of the blanks could have more than one correct word, based on a person’s background experience.
Pass out the handout Creating Cloze Text.
Ask tutors to choose one of the samples of text and use the correction fluid to cover up predictable words. Then ask them to work in pairs and to read each other’s text.