Let me again agree with Robin..I have worked with low literate ESL
learners on developing auditory awareness of stress and intonation, for
example by clapping out words and sentences, singing them with nonsense
syllables, like voice teachers do ( "la la la LA la") and by chunking (I
don't want the green one, I want the red one) so that they get gradually
more used to producing longer strings of words, which builds a sense of
themselves as speakers of English...With repetition and frequency, both
of which support auditory learning, they can do all of this without ANY
written representations!! If you then do substitutions, "he doesn't want
the green one, he wants the red one) then you are building  both
analytic skills and memory for formulaic language. Combining aural/oral
practice with an emphasis on concrete operations which make absolutely
clear the meaning of "what's going on here" (having the students
choosing between  red and blue crayon in the above instance) works very
well with these learners. 


Anne Whiteside


>>> robinschwarz1 at aim.com 05/14/08 4:01 PM >>>

Hi all, I am attaching a PowerPoint I presented at COABE a couple of
weeks ago on titled? "Assuring Success for Low/NonLiterate Learners."

In it I point out that persons who have no prior formal education need
the fundamental preliteracy skills needed for learning literacy---
visual perception and discrimination skills (to be able to understand
drawings and pictures, to discriminate letters and big letters from
small, and the different ways capitals are made from lower case letters)
fine motor and visual motor integration (to be able to correctly hold a
writing instrument and then be able to move it to make letters and to
copy words and letters from a far point to a near point); and
phonological awareness skills-- evidence is abundant that adults who are
non-literate have normally developed phonological awareness only to the
level of preliteracy-- that is, they have limited phonemic awareness,
can identify syllables, but have limited awareness of individual words
in sentences, cannot repeat nonsense words at the level of literate
adults, etc..?? Thus, for these learners to succeed in becoming
literate, they need
 
  to have these skills well in place.? My contention is that
non-literate learners struggle with reading acquisition because
instruction usually starts with the alphabet and letter sounds and these
learners have little idea of the concept of chunks of sound sequenced to
make meaning.?? Teachers I know who have backed up and taught the
concept of sound sequence using concrete objects and then transferring
that concept to letters and then sounds have found that learners made a
much smoother transition to reading than those who did not have this
training.? 

All of these skills are brand new and require lots and lots of time and
practice to be mastered, so having a learner pick up a pencil and then
move it accurately between lines whose relationship to writing is still
not understood, creating letters whose meaning is not well understood
either all adds up to lots of frustration and very, very slow learning,
if any.? 

The PowerPoint includes suggestions on helping learnings acquire these
skills.? I hope some of you find it helpful.?? Robin Lovrien Schwarz