Session Aim :

Reading And Writing By Phoneme - How To Find Words In A Dictionary To teach strategies for identifying how to pronounce and/or spell unfamiliar words, and how to carry out a dictionary search for an unfamiliar word.

Outcome

The student will be able to read a paragraph of text, chosen to include unfamiliar words, using phoneme identification strategies to make a "best guess" at how to say the unknown words. The student will be able to take down a short dictation, including unfamiliar words, using phoneme identification strategies to identify likely correct spellings of the words. The student will be able to find words in a dictionary using phoneme identification as a seach strategy, and will, as a further skill, be introduced to the thesaurus and the concepts of synonyms, antonyms, and multiple meanings and pronunciations of words, to be further examined in the next session.

Skills

The student will have been expected to have familiarity with the letter names and sounds of individual letters, and will be expected to have an functional awareness of vowels and consonents, i.e. to be aware that certain letters have different properties when combined in different ways. Dictionary, prepared texts

Resources : Session Plan :

Dealing with homework, if any; "Any other business" - matters raised by the student which caused problems since the last session, used to guide the content of subsequent sessions, covered briefly now; The concept of phonemes - possible sounds for individual letters, e.g. short and long "a" leads to The concept of homophones, e.g. "y" and "i", "ee" and "ei" leads to The concept of phonemes involving groups of letters, e.g. s+h=sh leads to The concept of modifiers to phonemes. e.g. changes due to the final "e" leads to The concept of variants of words, e.g. tenses, compounds of words, etc, such as run-running-ran

Task - Student shows examples in a short piece of text, and in a short spoken piece How to use the above phoneme skills to find possible spellings for unfamiliar words when spoken, and possible pronunciation of written words; reinforcement of the concept of homophones, and what to do if the word isn't there under any suggested spelling; Task - Student attempts to use the skills to find a series of words read to them, then attempts to pronounce another series of words given in writing; The student is told how dictionaries show spelling, although this must be treated as a source of possible confusion, as the "shorthand" used can be confusing to some students. Where a student is ESL every attempt should be made to relate phonemes to those found in the student's spoken and written language, especially for the Indic and Asian group languages, and Greek, Turkish, Russian, etc. A familiarity with Bengali, Hindi, Arabic, Chinese, and so on is useful, or reference should be made to other speakers of these languages for source materials showing the phone-symbol equivalents. Muslim students will generally be familiar with reading Qu'uran in Arabic, even if they don't understand the language itself, and this is an excellent starting point on how to read by assembling phonemes. Feedback Homework : : Student raises points relating to, requirements for further explanation, etc. Tutor sets a series of tasks for the student to carry out, as follows: Attempt to write down the words of a song from the charts or a TV programme; Find a piece of text, e.g. from a magazine, and be ready to read from it next session, explaining any areas of difficulty; Use a dictionary, at home or in the Library, to find out how to spell and pronounce words heard on TV, or read in e.g. a magazine.