Number Phonics

Karen Louise Davidson is a public school teacher, a homeschooling mother to her seven children, and a tutor of remedial reading. She searched for many years for a program that would best help her students learn to read. She studied every phonics program and used many of them with her students. She also studied strategies other than phonics for teaching word recognition, but did not find them to be useful. When she found Romalda Spaulding’s reading program, she felt it was inspired. Spaulding taught reading with phonics. She asked students to memorize a chain of sounds for a letter or combination of letters. The idea of chanting multiple sounds for one letter was appealing because it gave the student tools to work with in sounding out words. Davidson also liked Spaulding’s use of numbers under some letters of words. A number indicated a specific sound in a chain of sounds that the student had memorized. The student was to use that sound for this letter in a particular word. She found that her students easily memorized sound chains and liked using the numbers as clues to help them sound out words. Although Spaulding’s method worked well in some ways, it also had shortcomings. Davidson felt that the program could be simplified by eliminating the teaching of sounds for combinations of letters. This meant that a few more sounds would need to be taught for some letters, but it made the system simpler, more coherent, and easier for students to grasp. Also, since her students liked number clues under letters, she wanted to use numbers under every letter of a word. Davidson reasoned that it might be possible for students to teach themselves to read, if they knew all the sounds for letters and had numbers to tell them exactly which of the sounds to use in a word. Learning to read in English could then be totally a matter of logic, which it has never been before. Davidson plunged into a study of 2,000 high frequency words to see for herself what sounds were needed for letters in English words. She evaluated the sound for every letter of the 2,000 words. Then, sorting the letters and their sounds, she lined up all the sounds for each letter of the alphabet in a diagram, and taught students the sounds from the diagram. Assigning each sound a number, she used these numbers under every letter of 1,000 words. Davidson wanted to test whether students, knowing all the sounds, could sound out the words by logic. She was quickly rewarded. Her students learned to read with und

שנה

2005

שפה

English

הוצאה

Cune Press

מהדורות

2

עמודים

336

ISBN

9781885942210

מקור הנתונים: Wikidata