Another teacher used a cloze procedure to help her learner improve his skill in discriminating between phonemes. Reading a sentence aloud, the learner was required to identify which of three similar words (e.g. weight, weigh and weighed) was correct.

Probably the most intensive teaching of phonemic awareness occurred in several 1:1 sessions where the teachers were able to respond immediately to learner miscues and teach to the errors. These interchanges were very focussed on the learner’s difficulties.

One programme was notable for its heavy emphasis on the teaching of phonics based on an American series of videos. The teacher had chosen this approach because of her reading of research about phonics and seeing it used successfully by another teacher. This teacher found that the videos were a particularly fitting means of teaching phonics.

On the video she repeats, you know, so all the time, she’s revising and repeating and adding it in a structured way, which is very hard to do. To design teaching, lessons to do it naturally, is extremely hard, and it does teach reading, people really improve their reading, but where it’s not so good is that it’s hard for people to come in at different points of it [once the series is started].

Responding to reading miscues

We have already discussed above the issue of how the teachers responded to general questions and the significance of ‘teaching moments’. How miscues are dealt with in teaching reading is particularly important because the miscues not only signal the specific difficulties that learners are experiencing, but also provide the teacher with an opportunity to focus the teaching on that difficulty.

One teacher clearly indicated to her learner in advance that she would be available to help on any difficulties arising from his silent reading.

We did not see much evidence of teachers focusing their teaching on learners’ specific difficulties. One exception to this was a teacher who, after a learner had read her spelling list aloud, said “OK, let’s go through and have a look at your trouble spots.” The pair then reviewed her errors, discussing why they had been made, ways of preventing them in the future (e.g. talking about the ‘i’ before ‘e’ rule) and practising with comparable words. Word families covered in this process were then recorded in the learner’s notebook for future reference and review.

Below is an excerpt from the same session where the teacher infers an error in his spelling of ‘fish’. It is also a good example of the teacher prompting through questions, forcing the learner to provide the solution.