Structured Phonetic Instruction

Some students have severe gaps in their basic phonetic skills. These missing sounds can easily be taught with a week or two of tutoring. We provide and include a single page printed on both sides with the basics of structured phonetics. This single page can be used to sound out troublesome words as the student reads. The sounds on this page should be reviewed daily until mastered.

The big task is to get students to use these structured phonetic principles before wildly guessing. Students must learn to try out the different sound possibiliteis of a letter combination and "guess" which sound makes sense. This is the right way to guess. Then check out this educated guess with the accompanying sound. Our Voice and Text Tools make this very easy. Watch our Free Voice and Text Movies.

Stop Guessing

Guessing at words is the easiest reading problem to stop, and the quickest way to quickly and dramatically improve your reading. Instead of guessing at a word, students should try to first sound it out.

There are three main types of guessing that need to be stopped.

Guessing at a single word without even bothering to sound it out.

Changing the little words around the word you have guessed at, in order to have everything make sense. This is called cognitive dissonance.

Projecting what you think the rest of the phrase or sentence is going to say, without reading any of what is actually there. This is called cognitive projection.

Students need to be aware that when they hesitate as they read it is often because they have just made a mistake. They need to learn to back up and re-read what is actually there, rather than to continue to move forward.

Students also need to be taught that when their reading stops making sense, they need to back up and reread what is there.

The worst way to learn to read is by guessing at words and saying the wrong thing. Then you start to associate garbage with letter combinations.

With the availability of proper pronunciation for each word or phrase, students are much more likely to try to sound out words and develop good decoding skills. This improvement in reading may be observed almost immediately. It is a major advantage of our program.

In addition to the points about guessing just made, there are several specific types of guessing that can be further identified and easily corrected.

Student looks at a word and if he sees any part of it that he can pronounce, this is what he says. For example, a student will look at the word "this" and read "his". Stop this by insisting that the student pronounce at least the first two letters of each word as he comes to it. The ultimate pronunciation should be consistent with the sound of the first two letters.

Occasionally, a student will see all the letters in a word or phrase, but has gotten into the habit of starting to pronounce words part way through the word or phrase. This can easily be stopped by pointing out to the student what he or she is doing, and demanding that the student starts pronouncing from the beginning of the word or phrase.

The student will say a word out loud that has one or two more syllables than the word being looked at. Stop this by demanding that the student think about the syllable correlation between what is being looked at and what is being said.

The student will read "house" for "home". The student has read the base word correctly, but not bothered to read what was actually there. This is a mild form of projection, which should not be tolerated as it leads to much worse offenses.
The student will read the wrong tense of a verb. Solution is same as just above.

Student adds a word that is not even there, even though all other words are read correctly. This is an unacceptable form of projection. Point it out and insist that the student reads just what is there.

Student makes a very basic and elementary mistake in structured phonetics, like misreading to identical vowels side by side as a short vowel sound (except for "oo"), or missing the silent e rule, or missing that two consonants together make the preceding vowel short. The solution for these types of errors is the need for structured phonetic instruction. This is discussed in the next main section.

Suffix separation & re-combination. Student does not recognize the common suffix at the end of the word and what it means. Consequently, the reader does not pronounce the word at all, or incorrectly. The solution is the following. A) Practice the sound and look of each of the basic suffixes and what they mean, so that these suffixes can be recognized, understood and read easily. B) Separate off the suffix from the problem word and then look for and read out loud the base word. C) Recombine the base word with the suffix and read the combination, making sure the sound of the suffix is heard. Here are the basic suffixes: able, ible, ing, ed, y, ey, ly, s, es, er, or, ous, tion, sion, ance, ence.

False Dyslexia. Many times students appear to make a dyslexic mistake that is not dyslexia at all. When students don't know a word they may grasp for anything around the word that makes sense. This enables them to combine parts of words above below or to either side of what they are supposed to be reading. The result is a twisted up word. This type of mistake can be corrected immediately by insisting that when the student hesitates or falters, he or she backs up and carefully reads what is there.

Sometimes this happens within a word when the student does not know a basic sound. For example if a student does not know the sound of "wh" they can read "what" as "that". If they do not know the sound of "th" they may read "that" as "hat". The solution here is to learn the necessary phonetic sounds of "wh", "th", "sh" and "ch", etc., with some structured phonetic instruction.

The trainer points out all these mistakes to the student in the periodic consultation sessions, as the student makes the mistakes. The trainer shows the student how to identify and correct these mistakes as they are being made. The student sees how to improve, and that he or she can easily read with this better approach. The student now knows what to do in the future.