TEACHING ADULTS TO READ

Teaching reading is a complex undertaking, especially when the learner is an adult. Unlike children, adult learners cannot spend several hours in a classroom every day. Most adults learning to read find it difficult to attend classes at all; those who enroll in a basic education program can spend, at most, a few hours a week working on their reading.

When adult students arrive in the classroom, they can be at just about any level in their reading development, from beginning readers working on the fundamentals to more advanced readers ready to begin study for a high school level equivalency diploma.

Emotional factors such as motivation, engagement, and fear of failure play a major role in reading success. These feelings can be especially intense for adults, particularly for learners who have spent years struggling with reading and hiding their inability to read from family members, friends, coworkers, and employers.

Given the complexity of the task, what methods should educators use to help adult learners make substantial gains in their reading skills?

ALPHABETICS
What is alphabetics?

English is an alphabetic language. The letters in its alphabet represent the sounds of spoken English. The process of using the written letters in an alphabet to represent meaningful spoken words is called alphabetics, and includes both phonemic awareness and word analysis. Phonemic awareness is the knowledge of the basic sounds (phonemes) of spoken language. Word analysis is the knowledge of the connection between written letters or letter combinations and the sounds they represent.

WHY TEACH ALPHABETICS?

Phonemic awareness and word analysis help learners become familiar with how the English writing system works�a crucial step in learning to read. Students with good phonemic awareness know how to manipulate the individual sounds (phonemes) of spoken English. They know, for example, that the spoken word cat is made up of three sounds: /c/-/a/-/t/. (Note that letters appearing between slashes should be read as sounds�for example, /b/ is read as the first sound in bob-not as bee.)

Students with good word analysis know how individual letters and combinations of letters represent the sounds of spoken English. They know, for example, that the string of written letters c, a, and t represent the spoken word cat. They know how to blend sounds together to form regularly spelled words and how to recognize irregularly spelled words by sight. As readers advance beyond the very beginning levels, more complex aspects of word analysis, such as the knowledge of word parts (for example, prefixes, suffixes, stems, and compounds) and the use of tools such as the dictionary, may contribute to word reading ability.

Adult non-readers have virtually no awareness of phonemes, and adult beginning readers have difficulty manipulating phonemes. They also have difficulty applying letter-sound knowledge in order to figure out new or unfamiliar words while reading. When adult beginning reading instruction includes alphabetics, increases in reading achievement occur.

HOW DO YOU ASSESS ALPHABETICS?
Phonemic awareness is assessed orally through tasks that ask learners to demonstrate their ability to manipulate the sounds in spoken words.

Phoneme isolation: recognizing individual sounds in words, for example, "Tell me the first sound in paste." (/p/)
Phoneme identity: recognizing the common sound in different words, for example, "Tell me the sound that is the same in bike, boy, and bell." (/b/)
Phoneme categorization: recognizing the odd sounding word in a sequence of three or four words, for example, "Which word does not belong? bus, bun, rug." (rug)
Phoneme blending: listening to a sequence of separately spoken sounds and combining them to form a recognizable word. For example, "What word is /s/ /k/ /u/ /1/?" (school)
Phoneme segmentation: breaking a word into its sounds by tapping out or counting the sounds, or by pronouncing and positioning a marker for each sound, for example, "How many sounds are there in ship?" (three: /sh/ /i/ /p/)
Phoneme deletion: recognizing what word remains when a specified phoneme is removed, for example, "What is smile without the /s/?" (mile)
Word analysis is assessed through tasks that ask students to demonstrate their ability to say the sounds in written words or parts of words. Letters or letter combinations that represent a basic sound, or phoneme, are called graphemes. Students can be asked to pronounce single-letter graphemes, two-letter graphemes or digraphs, or larger word parts such as blends. Sample tasks would be:

"What sounds do these letters make: b, d, f?"
"What is the short vowel sound made by these letters: a, e, i?"
"What sounds do these letters make: ch, ck, oa, ee?"
"What sounds do these letters make: br, st, str, at, am?"
The ability to pronounce word parts can also be assessed with whole word tasks. To find out if someone can decode the short a vowel sound, for example, we might ask him or her to read the word can. Any response with a short a sound in the middle position would be correct (can, cat, or ban) because it contains the short a target phoneme.

Alphabetics: implications for teachers
Alphabetics can be improved by participation in adult education, and explicit instruction may be the best way to accomplish this. Explicit instruction consists of direct teaching of letter-sound relationships in a clearly defined sequence.

Effective word analysis strategies systematically teach letter-sound correspondences directly and explicitly. They focus on teaching learners how to convert individual graphemes (letters and letter combinations) into phonemes (sounds) and then blend them together to form a word. Or, they focus on converting larger letter combinations such as common spelling patterns into sounds (e.g., ing, able, un).