What I am actually looking for is a video
showing a teacher or tutor using successful, research-based strategies to
teach adults with LD in either a real classroom setting or one-on-one
setting.  I know that we 'talk' about what good LD Instruction should be,
but I am wondering whether any videos exist to show us.

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I am not an expert, but I have been trained in beginning Orton-Gillingham techniques, the granddaddy of most techniques out there. I have also been trained in Reading Revolution techniques, which combine hand movements with phonemic awareness and phonics. (And I worked at www.SchwabLearning.org for the last four years.)

Among other duties during this year of service, I am tutoring a 33-year-old Latina mother. While she has been in the US for 14 years, she had only six years of schooling in Mexico. I'm isolating the phonemes she doesn't know and teaching them fairly systematically.

The two videos by Meg Schofield of Literacy Solutions (copyright 1997)have already been mentioned. The quality is not great, but she does work one-on-one with an adult in the systematic way suggested by Orton-Gillingham. It was useful for me to watch these, but I'm not sure they are still available. She was associated with Chula Vista Public Library's Literacy program (near San Diego), but I'm told she now lives in Hawaii. Incidentally, there is a third video by her called "Laying It on the Line," about running small writing groups for new adult readers. As with the other two videos, there is an accompanying booklet for the tutor.

I've just started watching some Susan Barton videos that an educational therapist loaned me. Barton developed the Barton Reading and Spelling method, a simplified Orton-Gillingham approach, for dyslexic students, including adults. She says that unlike other methods, she incorporates spelling into each session. I like the way she immediately gets into two of the six syllable types so that a student has an attack strategy for multi-syllable words. Her teaching manual has a script for the tutor. I suspect the materials are aimed at younger students. These materials are very expensive, and you can't buy the books separate from the videos. www.BartonReading.com

It's not a video, but I find the book "Words Their Way" by Donald R. Bear et al (Pearson--new edition due in April) extremely useful with my adult learner. It comes with a CD with various PDFs, so that she can do, for example, word sorts to teach all the phonemes that pertain to a long e sound (VCe, ee, Ce, ea, ey). This approach is a little more constructivist than just reading lists in a workbook because the student identifies the patterns that emerge when you sort words into columns/categories. The book aimed more at teachers of kids, but it helps identify learners in various categories. Mine is a "transitional learner in the Within Word Pattern Stage" and is not ready for multi-syllables and heavy-duty affixes.

The book points out the five English vowel sounds not present in Spanish. I find the techniques I learned in Reading Revolution useful in teaching my learner these sounds. For example, the short i sound is represented by scooping and sticking the pointer finger in the air, as if it had just dipped in something "icky." That word and movement help my learner remember the sound of the short i, and I see her sticking her finger up when she's trying to spell something on her own. (The founder of Reading Revolution is severely dyslexic: www.readingrevolution.com)

Schwab Learning has lots of resources listed on its free website. Here's a link to the various LD organizations, who would have links to videos and other resources:

http://www.schwablearning.org/resources.asp?g=6&s=2

One final note, though it's also not a video: Route 66 Literacy was developed by Dr. Karen Erickson of the U of North Carolina/Chapel Hill to teach reading to developmentally delayed adolescents. A free beta version is available at:

http://www.route66literacy.org/demo/index.shtml

This is an online literacy program with content written at about a second grade level, but for adolescents and adults. Each screen of each story is illustrated with a contemporary photo. What is unusual about this program is that each screen is accompanied by a Teacher/Tutor script. With little training, tutors can help appropriate learners read. (Disclaimer: I volunteered at Benetech/Route 66 Literacy during the summer.)

Hope this helps--

Robbie Fanning
AmeriCorps Member in Literacy
San Mateo County Public Library
San Mateo, CA
MA, Instructional Technology
Writer
fanning at plsinfo.org
rfanning at mac.com
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