Case Study

The Interesting Group

The Interesting Group at St. Christopher House Adult Literacy Program got its name because the students think that what they do in the group is interesting. The students discuss the world around them and their own lives, write about issues that concern them, and read what other students have to say.

Often, students who are just beginning to learn how to read and write will dictate their ideas and stories to Nancy, the facilitator. Nancy will write what the students say on a flip chart or on a piece of paper, and use these written versions of what the students say as texts for reading. At other times, the students will study writing by other students at the St. Christopher House Program, or by adult students from other programs. Or they will work from Nancy’s flip chart notes of a discussion in the group.

The phonics work that they do is embedded in this interesting work. One evening, ten minutes may be devoted to phonics; the next evening, perhaps half an hour. The next evening, there may be no phonics work at all, because an important issue has come up for discussion.

When the students in the group do phonics work, they use written and spoken language from discussion, reading, and writing as raw material. Their phonics work does not start with speech sound and letters, but with language in use.

In the six years that Nancy has worked as the group’s facilitator, she has introduced phonics in a variety of ways. She tries to suit her approach to how the particular students that she is working with at the time seem to learn best. She experiments. She pays attention to how the students respond. She adjusts her approach as she goes.

For example, at one point, Nancy used handwriting to help the students to notice speech sounds at the beginnings of words. She did this in conjunction with work on word families. Suppose a word came up in the group, like“ Maggie”, the name of a group member. Nancy might take this opportunity to work on the sound “mmm” for the letter M. She would open the dictionary to the letter M, and read out familiar words:

mud
meat
microphone

She might throw in a phrase or two like “mad as hell”. She would show the students how to make the letter M in handwriting.

m

"And, at the same time as they’re handwriting it, and trying to get the flow, I’m just talking to them, and chattering away, and going on about all the other words starting with M." Then she would ask them to listen for “mmm” in a list of words, and tell her which words begin with the letter M.

milk
Milton
Sunday
Monday

At the next meeting of the group, she might take the first two speech sound and letters in “Maggie”, “mmm-aaa” for M-A, and look for words beginning with these speech sounds and letters. Perhaps this time, instead of choosing familiar words from the dictionary, she would choose words beginning with “mmm-aaa” from material that the students were reading or from a story that someone dictated:

macaroni
mangle
man

She would show the students how to join the letter M to the letter A in handwriting.

ma

She would ask the students to listen to words beginning with “mmm”, and to indicate which of these words begin with “mmmaaa”:

math
magpie
miracle
sack

Then she would work through words beginning with M-I in the same way. Finally, she’d ask the students, "Okay,‘ mitt’, is that M-A or M-I?"