Strategies for Working with Low Level Adult Readers

This page is from the Curriculum for the Adult Beginning Reader - Level 0-3.0

The following strategies are very important when teaching reading to low level adult learners:

  • Establish Positive Expectations
    Adults learn best when they feel that the teacher is caring and that the teacher believes they will succeed. One of the teacher’s most important tasks is to reassure learners that they will indeed become readers.

  • Expect Success
    The classroom environment is extremely important. Adults do not want to be treated like children, and the teacher should keep in mind that the learner is an adult. The adult may not have learned to read, but he/she can be extremely successful in other areas of life and deserves respect.

  • Collaborate Efforts
    The learner should be treated as a responsible, intelligent person who is in charge of his/her learning. Reading should be a collaborative effort, with the learner gradually assuming more and more responsibility for self-direction.

  • Clarify Goals
    The teacher can help the student clarify goals and together discuss ways of accomplishing them. Long-term goals, such as becoming a proficient reader or obtaining a GED, may seem over-whelming at first. Goals should be broken down into smaller objectives, and the teacher should be careful not to make the instruction too fast-paced. For example, at the beginning of each lesson the teacher should discuss what will be done that day to establish with the learner the daily objectives.

  • Relate Reading to Meaning
    From the beginning, the teacher should guide the learner into the realization that speaking, listening, reading, and writing are related. Adult beginning readers often perceive reading as a decoding process. To them reading is a process of sounding out words or identifying their individual meanings rather than a meaning-making process.

In summary, all adults can learn, and some strategies enhance learning. The adult is capable of self-direction and full participation in the learning process. The teacher can facilitate this by his confidence in the learner; by estab-lishing goals, methods of instruction and assessment mutually with the adult; by relating goals to learner needs; and by creating a comfortable, positive environment for learning.

Teaching Sight Words

Decide on 4-5 words to be covered.

  1. Print these words in lower case letters on index cards, one word for each card.

  2. Ask the learner to dictate a sentence to you using each of these words. You write the sentence on the back of the card. Underline the word to be taught.

  3. Show each word to the learner. Say the word as he/she looks at it. Ask the student to look at the word and repeat it. Read the sentence on the back of the card aloud. Ask the student to read the sentence.

  4. At the next lesson, review the words and sort into two piles: words the student remembers and words not recognized immediately. Put the cards the learner knows on a notebook ring.

  5. Review the unknown words, one at a time. Tell the learner the word. Have the learner look closely at it, noticing the shape and number of letters. Ask him/her to trace the word in the air or on the table.

  6. Have the learner say the word and ask how he/she would use it in a sentence.

  7. Mix new and old sight words and review often.

  8. Add words learned to a notebook ring so that the learner can see his/her own progress.

Teaching Nouns and Verbs

  1. Name that Picture: The teacher will need the following materials: pictures of people, places, things, action pictures, and paper.

    2. Ask the learner to verbally identify each picture as a person, place, or thing. On a sheet of paper draw three columns. In one put the word "people", another "places", and the last "things." Have the learner write down the name of the object in the correct column.

    Example: if the picture is a man, the learner writes "man" in the "people" column.Ask the learner to verbally identify the action in a picture.

  2. Write down a noun (example, dog); have the learner think of a noun that starts with the last letter of that word (example, girl). Continue with as many words as possible.

  3. Ask the learner to identify nouns and verbs in language experience stories.

Homework Assignments

Each day the learner can bring in something he/she would like to read—label, ad, mail, recipes, manuals, letters, comics, children’s books, poems. Have the student copy the material and then read it aloud with you reading aloud also. A word bank card can be kept of any difficult words.

 

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