THE METHOD IN PRACTICE
BEGINNING TO TEACH
This site describes the process of teaching by the Redfern Method as if the dyslexic student retains nothing from previous attempts at learning to read. But if a student already has a partial knowledge of reading, the tutor should adjust lessons accordingly and not hold him back in progressing to reading words and sentences.
The tutor begins by speaking the three sounds in the word cat, slowly and distinctly. (If working with a child, the tutor might say, “I’m going to say a word in a funny way, and you see if you can tell what word I’m saying.”) Don’t speak the names of letters this time, just the sounds: c [pronounced k]-ǎ–t.
If needed, the tutor sounds out the word several times, until the student correctly guesses the word that the sounds spell.
When the student guesses right, the tutor should be liberal with praise. For instance, if the tutor pronounces the sounds c-a-t and the student guesses that the word is cat, the tutor can say, “Cat! That’s right! Good for you! Now let’s try another one.”
The tutor then pronounces other words of one syllable, again using the short vowel sound ǎ: bat, fat, hat, mat. (Rhyming words make it easier for a student at first.)
When the student has guessed several “at” words correctly, the tutor changes the words a bit, to ran, fan, can, pan. Note that all these are one-syllable words, and that all contain the ǎ sound. In this way, the student sees that mastering one sound-letter combination can help him to know other words as well.
WRITING LETTERS and WORDS
When teaching the student to write, the tutor takes a sheet of paper, draws a vertical line down the middle, and numbers each side of it—1 through 10—skipping every other line. [A ruled worksheet is available for download WorksheetWorks_Print_Handwriting_Practice_1.] At first, the tutor writes a word and the student reads it aloud (again using one-syllable words with the ǎ sound).
After the tutor does 10 of these, the student is told, “Now you pick up your pencil and write the letters as I say the sounds. The tutor speaks the three sounds in the word cat, slowly and distinctly, and the student repeats them, then writes the letters. (If the student does not yet know how to form letters, the tutor should take care to help him form them correctly.)
The tutor speaks a few more one-syllable words using the sound ǎ and has the student write them.
After this practice with speaking and writing, the tutor places a flash card for the sound ǎ where the student can see it easily. The card has the capital letter A, the lower-case ǎ, a picture of an apple, and the word apple, which is the key word for the short-vowel sound ǎ. [Flash cards showing key words for all the sound-letter combinations will be used in the word-drill that’s a part of each lesson. These cards can be downloaded on the LESSONS page of this site.]HERE
WRITING SENTENCES
When the student has gotten fairly good with the short a words, the tutor should write a sentence for him: That man has no gas. The tutor says, “Let’s read this sentence. You can read a whole sentence now.” Nearly all kids recognize the word no and know how to spell it, but if a student does not, the tutor simply tells him.
Then tutor and student should do another sentence: Pat and Sam had a bat. The teacher can sometimes use the student’s own name also, since a child can almost always read his own name.
PLAN FOR TEACHING SESSIONS
After the first session (or sessions, depending on the student’s skill) about short-vowel sounds—which helps the student begin to decode letters and words—each teaching session will begin with a word-drill, using flash cards that show pictures of key words associated with each sound-letter combination. The drill includes even sound-letter combinations that have not yet been studied in depth, since students absorb some knowledge from mere repetition.
Following the word-drill, each session contains a lesson that focuses on new learning about one sound-letter combination, with many examples of words using that combination.
Then comes a writing exercise that teaches (at first) the correct way to form letters and how to join letters together. The tutor dictates words that use short vowels (or whatever sound-letter combination is being studied), and the student writes on the ruled work sheet. Once students are good at writing words, they go on to writing simple sentences, then longer, more complex ones.
As soon as a student gains some mastery of sounds, letters, and words, the tutor starts him on reading a story. This may be a simple one at first, but it should have some interest for the student. This is shared reading, with the tutor reading aloud a single sentence of a story, then the student reading a single sentence. They continue through the story, alternating in reading sentences aloud.
As the student reads, if he comes to a word he doesn’t know, the tutor can say, “What’s the first sound?” This helps the student get the whole word. But students shouldn’t be made to sound out every word they don’t know, because reading should be fun, a reward for having done the hard work of learning sounds, letters, and words.
As the lessons progress, the tutor should use some words that were already studied, in order to fix previous lessons in the student’s mind. This helps the student to build a vocabulary, which increases his confidence.
Each teaching session, after the initial one(s), consists of these parts (depending on the amount of time available in a session):
- Word-drill
- New learning about a sound-and-letter combination
- Dictation, words and sentences
- Shared reading
WORD DRILL
The tutor should prepare a loose-leaf notebook of flash cards showing the sound-letter combinations that will be studied in the lessons. [The entire deck of flash cards is available on the LESSONS page.] Each flash card has on it a letter, or letters, that make a certain sound and a picture associated with it. For example, for the “short-a” sound, the flash card shows the capital letter A, the sound , and a picture of an apple with the word underneath.
Each teaching session begins with tutor and student going through the whole book of flash cards. The tutor pronounces the letter, the sound, and the word on each card, and the student repeats each after the tutor.
WHY? The reason for going through all the cards each time, even before the student has had a detailed lesson about any letter-sound combination, is that the student absorbs (through repetition) knowledge of all the sound-letter combinations without his even realizing it.
For the first few teaching sessions, the tutor may need to reinforce the fact that reading always goes from left to right.
NEW LEARNING
After doing the word drill on the entire book of flash cards, each session includes a lesson that focuses on one sound-letter combination. Each of the five vowels has both a short and a long pronunciation. (The long-vowel sound is the same as the name of the letter that spells it, for example ā.)
Begin with all the short vowels (ă, ĕ, ĭ, ŏ, ŭ), then do the long vowels (ā, ē, ī, ō, ū), then other sounds and the spellings for these.
The child may need more than one guess to get the right word, but when he does, he should be praised for getting it right.
The tutor reinforces the learning about this sound-letter combination by following up with many words that contain that same sound, such as “rat” and “bat.” [Lists of similar words are available on the LESSONS page of this site.]
WHY? Reading many words containing the same sound fixes the new learning in the child’s mind and makes him aware that, by mastering the sound-letter combination on the flash card, he is also learning to decode many more words.
SYLLABLES
The term syllables can be introduced whenever the tutor begins to use longer words as examples of sound-letter combinations. The tutor should point out that words often have more than one part, each part with a different sound, and the parts are called syllables. Give numerous examples: number, looking, awful.
WRITING
As noted on the Redfern Method page, white space is especially important for dyslexics, because words can appear to run together. To help with this, give the child a worksheet with ruled lines and plenty of white space to write on. [A ruled worksheet is available on the LESSONS page.]
Once the child has learned to form letters well, teach him to write a “running alphabet” of the lower-case letters in cursive, joining a to b, then b to c and so on.
WHY? This helps the student to review alphabetical order. And joining letters together, rather than printing each separately, helps students to realize that letters are not separate words but parts of a word.
When dictating words, take care that the student correctly forms the lower-case letters (which are used much more than capital letters). Often, students make the small a and the small o too similarly, also the u and v. Or students may fail to make the “tall” letters and the capital letters any taller than other letters. They may make a w look the same as a series of the undotted i. And they may have no idea how to make rarely used letters, such as q or x.
Be sure to not only teach students how to form each letter but also to make sure they aren’t crowding the letters together too much.
Once the student is forming letters well, and can write words well, the writing sessions should add simple sentences, such as “Get the red hat.”
CORRECTING THE WORK
The student should be taught to correct his own work, using the scratch-out method. If he misforms a letter, or misspells a word—maybe he writes bal when the word should be bat—the tutor should say, “That’s a scratch-out; I said bat.” The student draws a line through the incorrect word, then tries again until he’s able to write the correct answer. Each time a scratch-out is noted, the tutor should put a -1 beside it to show that a point is deducted for an incorrect answer.
The tutor should dictate a word or sentence twice. After the second time, if the student needs to hear it pronounced again, he can ask as many times as he needs to, until he can write the word or sentence as given.
When the writing part of the lesson is completed, the tutor counts the number of scratch-out points deducted. For example, if the student made 3 errors, the tutor deducts that number from 100 (a perfect score) and says, “Your score for this exercise is 97; that’s a good score.”
WHY? Deducting points missed from a perfect 100, ending with what is almost always a high score, raises the student’s self-esteem. Students will still strive for a perfect score the next time—they always want that 100—but this way of grading encourages them by letting them see that they are already fairly near to reaching perfection.
SHARED READING
This part should be fun for students, a reward for learning to decode letters and words. So stories read should contain mostly familiar words and should have high interest for the child. Most libraries have “easy-reading” books that are mostly pictures and use simple words.
WHY? Reading only one sentence (even if it is very short, such as “No.”) helps students to develop “sentence sense,” that is, to recognize that a mark of ending punctuation (a period, a question mark, or an exclamation mark) indicates the end of a sentence.
The tutor and student begin by looking at the book’s cover and talking about what the story will likely be about. As tutor and student read through the story, they can talk about whether it develops as they expected.
The tutor reads the first sentence of the story, and then the student reads the second, and they alternate through the rest of the book. It’s very important that each person read one and only one sentence at a time.
When you, the tutor, are reading, go no faster than the student reads as he’s struggling along. Don’t hurry the student, or tell him a word while he is still in the process of thinking about it, because that can make him feel frustrated. But don’t allow him to sit looking at a word for an unduly long time, because he then loses the sense of what he had been reading. If the word is one that he can decode from what he has learned about sounds and letters, have him sound out the word’s parts until he gets the word. If the word is one he can’t decode, simply tell him the word after giving him a few seconds to fix its appearance in his mind. With this method, a student can usually identify the word after encountering it a few times.
The student must keep his eyes on the book while the tutor is reading; otherwise, there’s no point in the tutor’s reading. If the tutor sees the student looking somewhere else, they should tell him to keep his eyes on the book. Tutor and student may look on the same book while doing shared reading, or each may have his own copy.
Do not let a mistake go uncorrected while the student is reading. When reading becomes somewhat easier for him, he will want to go faster. But then students often get careless with the little words that they can read easily. For example, if the sentence is “He found a flower in the box,” a student might say “He found the flower in a box.” The tutor simply says, “That’s not the right word.” The student takes another look and says, “Oh, that’s ‘the,’” or “Oh, that’s an ‘a.’”
Watch for signs of fatigue in the student, because reading is hard for someone who’s dyslexic. To force a student to continue when he’s tired is useless. If the tutor notices a student is tiring, either take a break or quit the lesson entirely.
Sometimes the student gets “hooked” on a story and wants to finish it. But if the tutor sees that he isn’t up to it, when it comes the tutor’s turn to read, they should simply say, “Why don’t you close your book and I’ll finish reading this story.” That way, the student still gets enjoyment from the story without the frustration of trying to read when he’s tired.