Sounding Out New Strategies

In early field experience, some student teachers are asked to observe his or her host teacher and others are asked to jump right into helping the students. Often, these student teachers help during reading and writing lessons. At this time, student teachers can put into practice the strategies that they learned from their own courses as well as follow their host teacher’s strategies. But what if you hear your host teacher say “sound it out” to a student when they ask for help on a word? Should the student teacher follow his or her lead or does that teacher have other options?

According to the article, Sounding Out: A Pervasive Cultural Model for Reading, written by Catherine Compton Lily, “sounding out” has historically been the go-to strategy when helping students learn various words and texts. However, this strategy does not seem to fully enrich the students. For instance, sounding out may help with letter sounds, but it does not help the children make meaning of their readings. Thus, it does not help the student recall their material.

Sounding out may have been used in every aspect of a child’s life. From older siblings, to teachers, parents and friends; most children have come across someone in this or her life utilizing this strategy.  This may have been the case for many years, however, more strategies have been discovered to help the students in this subject area.

Children are now being taught that there a multiple strategies available to help with reading and writing, not just one. For instance, children can be prompted to read the sentence context and to ponder which word choice they would choose while attempting to decipher the authors word choice. Students can make predictions about the story they are reading. It is also good practice to refer to the student’s real world experiences to help them learn the word that they may be having trouble with. For example, if a child is stumped on the word “cafeteria”, the teacher can say” This is good one, you go eat lunch at this place everyday!” These ideas and so many more are helpful strategies.

            It is also important to understand that each child is different and some may need extensive instruction in these subject areas, as Dr. Shayne Piasta suggests in her podcast. For this reason, using multiple strategies will be beneficial for those students as well. For the students that have help at home, including parents in the different strategies is a wonderful idea. The parents can reinforce this critical thinking behavior at home while their child is completing homework or enrichment activities.

In a world where education reform is changing every day, it is more important than ever to teach children to be self-sufficient and critical thinkers. The “sounding-out” strategy is not a bad choice, however it should be used in addition to other tools as an aid instead of the main strategy. These tools will allow students to succeed in school and out of school no matter what is happening politically. 

Podcast with Dr. Shayne Piasta

http://www.voiceofliteracy.org/posts/37208