the reading tipster: Tips for Volunteer Reading Tutors

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Many schools use volunteers to increase the adult/child ratio in reading practice sessions. Volunteer tutors are often untrained and perhaps unsure about how best to help young readers. The Reading Tipster will help you take full advantage of this volunteer time by providing some strategies that you can teach tutors who are working one-on-one with your students.

Every volunteer tutor is blessed with instant recognition of words, and it is often very difficult to put yourself in the shoes of a child whose experience with the printed word is limited. Often tutors ask students to “sound it out” when they come to an unrecognizable word, because that’s what they would do. The problem is that many students do not have the skills to “sound out” words, and secondly, “sounding out” is always a slow, distracting process that can interfere with the student’s ability to hear the story being played, so to speak, in their head. Although it is an appropriate method for relatively proficient readers, it is important that beginning students use faster methods to decipher unrecognizable words.

Here are some prompts tutors can use instead of just saying, “Sound it out.” It is helpful for tutors to introduce these strategies with students, explain them in clear language, and to allow time for the student to practise. A good way for tutors to teach children these strategies is to talk out loud about what you are thinking as you take on the role of a student trying to make good guesses about what the difficult word might be. First you model the strategy, thinking out loud about what you are doing, explaining every step, then do it again in another passage, asking the student to help you. Next, while the student is reading, prompt them to use the strategy, and lastly you can just say, “Do you know a strategy you could use to help you read this difficult word?” Over time, the student should be able to use a number of these strategies independently.

Reading Strategies

Get your mouth ready for the first sound.
Ideally, if the student has looked at the picture, is listening to the story being played in their head, is mouthing the first sound, and looking quickly ahead to the ending sound, the right word should pop into his/her head. To practice this, cover up a word so that only the first and last sound or ending such as ed, ing, is exposed (a piece of card or finger will work) and ask the student to think about the story and think of a word that would make sense in the story and look right. This, of course, doesn’t work well if the child doesn’t have a sufficient English vocabulary, so then you just need to tell them the word, but it is a very useful way for children to look quickly at words, and make good guesses that are often accurate.

Skip the word and go on to the end of the sentence.
Sometimes, if children skip the word and go on to the end of the sentence, they will be able to go back, reread the sentence, get their mouths ready for the first sound, and a word that makes sense and looks right will pop into their heads. Again, these activities only work well with children who have sufficient English.

Look for chunks you know.
This is much more helpful than letter by letter sounding out, because children often know chunks like ing, ed, and word families like at, or, in, etc. Ask them to use their fingers to cover up the chunks they know and “sound out” around them. To practice, let children work with a list of words that have chunks they might know in them, for example, chinning, forked, startled, etc. and help them identify the chunks or little words inside the big word that they know and use that knowledge to quickly get the whole word.

Use familiar rhyming words.
When children get to a word that has a familiar “ending” or “rhyme” part, you can ask them, “Does that word look like a word you know?” If they have no response, print a word you think they might know that rhymes with the unknown word on the blank sheet of paper you should always have ready for the quick lessons you might teach as the child reads. If the word is “bike” for example, you might print “like” on the paper, and “bike” might become recognizable. If they don’t get the word, you might do a little work on word families right there and then. Write “like” then explain how you would get “ike” if you took the “l” off, and then if you add a “b” it’s “bike” and then write “hike,” “Mike,” and “spike” and ask them to figure the new words out. Explain that if you take your finger and cover up all the letters in front of the first vowel, sometimes you can ask yourself, “Do I know a word that looks like that?” and it might help them get the word. Later, play a game where you print a list of words that rhyme, cover up the first letter and ask, “Do you know a word that looks like this?” Research has shown that it is more helpful for children to recognize “chunks” of words than individual sounds in words. Focusing on the word family “chunk” at the end of the word will help children read rhyming words.

Make sure the word matches.
This strategy is what you say and do when a child makes an error by saying a word that makes sense in the story, but isn’t the right word. For example, if the child reads, “The cat ran to the mat,” and the printed word is “rug” instead of “mat” you would cover the word “mat” up with your finger, and say, “It could be mat; that makes sense, but what letter would mat start with? They say, ‘m’ and you uncover the word ‘rug’ and say, “Is this ‘mat’? What other word would look right and make sense?” This is a mistake often made by beginning readers who look at the picture and do not always carefully look at the print to ensure that it “matches.”

Betty Schultze is a retired primary school teacher with extensive experience as a literacy consultant. She is the co-author of What’s Next for this Beginning Writer? available at: www.pembrokepublishers.com