In this chapter, I have presented techniques for working on phonics with adult beginning readers. My presentation has been based on the information and ideas which I gathered in the Sounding Out Words Project. This chapter is about how phonics guidelines are actually learned in the community literacy programs.
The information and ideas which I encountered have been interpreted by me. They cannot replace experience. But they make other people’s experience explicit in a format which is useful for learning how to be a tutor or facilitator, or thinking about the direction of one’s work, and improving this work.
I hope that, by identifying three basic techniques, this chapter makes these techniques more open for discussion and experimentation., I hope that the case studies have put enough clothes on the bare bones of these techniques to shoe how they look in real life, in actual community literacy work.
What the case studies do, at least, is to suggest the infinite variety of work which the three basic techniques allow. For a new tutor or facilitator, it may be intimidating to think about such infinite variety. On the other hand, it may be reassuring to realize that, reduced to its bare essentials, any particular technique will probably involve some variant of at least on of the three essentially simple basic techniques that I have described. By studying these basic techniques, a new tutor of facilitator will learn simple but powerful tools.
In the next chapter, I show how working with the three basic techniques leads to further phonics work, as students become progressively independent readers and writers, using phonics information that they learned as beginning readers to sound out new words by themselves. So the power of the three basic techniques extends beyond what has been discussed in this chapter.