Help needed...teaching an adult to read

[anneyland]

I have a friend whose son is 22 and can't read hardly at all. A long story on how he was passed over and not able to read.

Do you guys have any suggestions on how to help this young man learn how to read?

I home-schooled my kids but would you use the same type curriculum to teach an adult to read?

She needs help quickly as he needs to get a GED as soon as possible.

Thanks for all and any suggestions.

[Wally]

Work on building vocabulary - meaning and pronunciation.

Work with news headlines - short articles. read myway.--- news articles then have him explain news bits to you.

Also check out your local library. They may have several reading programs.
Don't rush, do it right.

Read Bible tracts. Daily Bread.


Read tool instructions, sports blurbs (Find an interest of the reader)

[NewWorldOrder]

I would teach him using phonics. Start with the alphabet, make sure he knows what the letters are. Then teach him that each letter makes a sound, and that that some letters make two sounds, and we call them vowel letters. Once he learns all the sounds to the letters, then start by teaching him the special sounds that the letters make when combined with other letters. You can make flash cards with the just the special sounds like "ch" then put that special sound in front of other special sounds like "at". ch + at = chat.

I know with his being 22 it may feel too young for him, but Abeka's kindergarten and first grade reading programs are excellent, and he would do really well with it, and should catch on pretty quickly. If you have something that you already use for teaching reading, than try using that instead.

[Cookies4me]

If he was passed up in school and can't hardly read at 22 you may want to think dislexia.

Starting with phonics is a great idea. You need to see what he actually knows and go from there. If the smaller words are fine then work your way up to larger syllable ones.

[Cookies4me]

These books were great for my struggling reader.
http://www.dorbooks.com/index.html

[bookworm1711]

There is probably more than one way to successfully help an adult to read, or read better.

I have used a book called Let's Read by Leonard Bloomfield and Clarence Barnhart. This book can be used successfully to teach beginning reading from scratch. Using Let's Read will bring any student up to about the fourth grade comprehension level. I then use other material to raise them further.

But before I learned of the Let's Read book, I had studied a book called Language by Leonard Bloomfield, a major text on linguistics, in a linguistics course in graduate school.

I was teaching night school at Cass Technical High School, and a student enrolled to take English. I gave him a pretest, and he scored about third grade level. When I told him the results, he said those results were not valid, because he could not read at all.

So, I checked him out, one on one, and sure enough he was telling the truth. He could not even recognize or read the word "the." He had graduated from another high school with a B average. It is quite a story how he managed that. Now he was trying to get a job with the police department, and there was no way he could pass the entrance test until he learned to read.

I created my own on-the-spot reading program using words that sound alike and are spelled alike to start with: "hat, pat, cat, fat, mat, vat." "pan, Dan, van, can, ban."

Then I introduced structure words, such as "to be" verbs: am, is, are, was, were, be, being, been." I introduced the noun markers: a, an, the, our, your, their, my.

I worked with this student enough to where he could actually read simple sentences.

Once I had him as far as perhaps a second grade reading level then I had him use the self-instructional reading program I had written for my remedial reading students when I taught seventh grade junior high school English.

My student was very eager to learn to read. He even traveled to my church on Wednesday nights where I tutored him before and after prayer meeting.

He was one very happy young man when he found himself now able to read well.

Far as I know, he never did join the police department. I found his name in the telephone book nearly thirty years later and called his home. I did not reach him, he was at work. But apparently he has done well in the automotive industry.

I have since helped many children, and adults, to learn to read, or to read better.

I home schooled my two children, and they are excellent readers.

[Wally]

Something we had with our DS was to go check his eyesight. DS was struggling in reading when we found out that he was seeing everything double. The Dr prescribed exercizes to get the eyes working together looking at objects at different distances. Glasses would come later.

It was night and day difference in his reading ability.

Sometimes there is a physical hurdle that may be part of the solution.

[mommaofmany]

The very best book that I have found for teaching an older or even adult reader is "Phonics Pathways". It's only about $20 new and is easily found. It is really, really effective and not at all demeaning to an older learner. :thumb

[Cookies4me]

:nod thats the link I posted above. :thumb

[Rinji]

Don't forget the spelling either!

I wish I knew what series of phonics we had in grade school, but the spelling and reading and grammar were closely related.
And each spelling list wasn't just random, it was vocabulary, and sets of words that had similar spelling rules/pronunciations. It also included bonus spelling words, and a few tricky words, that might look like they were in the same group or just looks weird all together (just for contrast. You might not remember bat, cat, mat, sat, as well as ,cat, mat, brat, bat when you're far enough along.)
It started with single syllable words, like, bat, then worked towards blends, for words like brat, and gnat. Then it moved on to 2 syllable words, and repeated the the process over again. It went over special prefixes and suffixes too. so words ending in '-tion', were a breeze because you could break all the words down.

If you can get him started on 7 words a day (because much more might be an overload, the average person can only remember up to 7 things at a time). And don't forget that the average person needs to write something about 17 times to remember it. He should hit the ground running.

Actually, consulting an English as a second language book might not be a bad idea for lists of vocabulary words.

Maybe grab some menus, any pamphlets, newspapers, and stuff you find everywhere for sample reading? It might make it easier when it's more relevant material. Magazines with his interests might be good too. Closed captioning on the TV might help improve speed when he gets to that point.

I hope that helps!