by Guy Ewing
The following chapters are excerpted from Don’t Talk to Me About Vowels, published by Metro Toronto Movement for Literacy in 1994, as part of the Sounding Out Words Project. This book examines how phonics work is done in community-based literacy programs.
The running text provides background information for tutors and facilitators. Along with this text are Case Studies, which can be read in conjunction with the text or by themselves. For students and their tutors/facilitators, there are Working Ideas Boxe, which present specific ideas for ways of working with phonics information, raise questions, and provide the basis for negotiation between students and tutors/facilitators about ways of working
In this chapter, I describe specific techniques for presenting phonics information to adult beginning readers that are used in community literacy programs. The techniques provide ideas about that tutors, facilitators, and learners can do in working with phonics guidelines.
People in the community programs that I talked with during this project warned me not to create a resource which simply presents innumerable techniques for phonics work. During the Sounding Out Words Project, I encountered ways of working with phonics that, if not innumerable, were at least many and various. It would not be useful for me to present all of this information. But the many techniques that I observed and discussed were actually variations on three basic techniques:
In this chapter, I concentrate on techniques for phonics work with adult beginning readers. In the next chapter, I show how this beginning phonics work can lead to more independence in reading.