Part of what tutors and facilitators can do to help students to apply previous knowledge and experience is simply to recognize this role. Like beginning students, students who have progressed to a point where they can sound out words independently do not always know what they know.
One thing that students often know without knowing it is how to pronounce many sequences of letters that occur in larger words. As I explained, in the previous section, this knowledge come from work with smaller words, phonics work as well as learning from reading experience to recognize words at sight.
For Roland, a former adult literacy student who is now a tutor, being shown that he already knew parts of longer words was a breakthrough.
I learned the smaller words. Then I found out how you can put them together
and make big words. It’s remembering the smaller words, and then, in big words, sort
of connecting the smaller words by separating them.
- Roland, volunteer tutor, Parkdale Project Read
Roland believes that a tutor/facilitator should take the initiative in pointing out to students the parts of unfamiliar words that they already know how to pronounce. He even does this in shorter words. For example, when he talked to me, he had recently helped a student to read DASH by pointing out to the student that he could already pronounce the last three letters.
That the pronounceable parts come from small words has the advantage of providing
the learner with the
possibility of questioning his own attempt at sounding out the word. If the
student says to himself, "Well, the last
part of this word, A-S-H is ‘ash’, he can check this against his
own memory of how the word ASH is spelled."
When they sound it out, it makes them know that they’ve got it correct,
whereas if they’re sort of in pace just making a sound, they don’t know that they’re
actually right.
- Alexis, staff person, YMCA Learning Opportunities Program
But, as in Roland’s example, it does not matter if the pronounceable sequence of letters in a word is in the larger word. As Adela, a staff person at St. George’s Adult Literacy Program, says:
Encourage people to find something they recognize, no matter what it is.
- Adela, staff person, St. George’s Adult Literacy Program
Adela has developed an interesting technique for helping people to find pronounceable sequences of letters in larger words. This technique is presented in a Working Ideas Box.
Working Idea
Finding parts of words
Are you having trouble breaking down big words? Here’s one method for finding readable parts in big words.
Draw a small frame on a piece of see-through acetate. Put this frame over a word that you are trying to break down, and move it along until it frames a group of letters that you can read. The frame should be big enough for about 3 letters at a time.
One step along the way, to help students to recognize that there are words within words can be to work with compound words, like SOMETHING. This usually involves sounding out a compound word by recognizing the smaller words that it contains. In an interesting twice, Jackeye, a staff person at the Regent Park Learning Centre, encourages students to make up their own compound words. This work is explained in a Working Ideas Box.