Case Study
East End Literacy Training Video (from Chapter 1)
In an East End Literacy tutor training video, Michael, a staff person, works with two students, Stu and Ron, in an unrehearsed tutoring session. Michael, Stu, and Ron talk about the day Ron moved into Stu’s place. Michael writes a story of the move from what Stu and Ron have told him. Then Michael helps the students read the story back. Ron is a stronger reader than Stu, so he works with Michael to help Stu. In this excerpt from the video, Stu is reading the sentence: All of Ron’s stuff (clothes, stereo, games,) fit in the back of the car.
Michael: (Pointing to ALL) That’s a hard one for you. It doesn’t sound like it looks. It’s “all”
Stu: All of Ron’s ... sss
Ron: Keep going.
Michael: “All of Ron’s ... “
Stu: ... stuff.
In this example, Stu illustrates “sounding out words”. He identifies the word “stuff” with the help of a letter-speech sound correspondence, the correspondence between the letter S and the speech sound “sss”. This speech sound gives him the starting point for using the context of the story to identify the word. Michael rereads the beginning of the sentence containing the problematic word to help him. Because of Stu’s familiarity with the story, and because Stu is good at using context in reading, he is able to identify the word with the help of only one letter-speech sound correspondence. He does not use sounding out the word as an exclusive strategy. His familiarity with phonics guidelines does not have to be extensive.
Later in the video, we see Stu have trouble identifying the word “fit”. Michael covers up the F, and asks Stu to read what’s left over. Stu reads “it”. Then Michael tries to get Stu to put a “fff” sound in front of the “it” to produce “fit”. When Stu has trouble doing this, Michael gets Stu and Ron to give him a list of words ending in the sound “it”. They come up with the following list:
fit
pit
sit
bit
spit
In eliciting and writing down this list of words, Michael has chosen a guideline about letter-speech sound correspondences which he thinks might help Stu to sound out words by putting initial consonants in front of letter sequences he that he can already identify, like IT.