Teaching teenagers and adults to read: the magic finger

This is a Book Week guest post by Jenny Goddard. Jenny taught her first person to read when she was nine and has helped children, teenagers and adults start their journey into the reading ever since, including me around 34 years ago. (Oh and she’s also my mum.) Jenny has some tips for teaching teenagers and young adults to read.

The magic finger

This is the method I used to teach the teenagers and young adults I tutored. It’s very similar to the methods I used to teach my sisters, my children and other children. It’s important to bear in mind that any learning difficulties or disabilities the student has will impact on the speed with which they are able to learn to read and the effectiveness of the method.

• The first thing to do is to make sure they know the alphabet, combining each letter with a word that uses that letter’s most common sound.
• Once they’ve mastered the alphabet, you can then start building very small words. For example, ‘at’, ‘cat’, ‘bat’, ‘sat’ and ‘it’, ‘bit’, ‘fit’ and ‘sit’. Keep them very simple and stick to phonetics. Tricky words and sounds should be left until a fair bit later.
• Once they’ve got a good number of small, single-syllable words mastered, then you can introduce ‘the’.
• And then you can use ‘the’ to make simple sentence, such as ‘The cat had a hat.’ or ‘The sun is hot’. They are always completely amazed that they are able to read a whole sentence.
• As they progress, I then start using the ‘magic finger’. I point (with the magic finger) to a syllable that I know they know and hide any tricky syllables that will confuse or scare them. I then use the ‘magic finger’ to gradually move over the other parts of the word to build it up until they can read the whole word.

The advantage of one-to-one tutoring is that you know exactly what the student knows, so you can guarantee that you are moving at the right pace for them. In a larger classroom, this often isn’t possible. It also meant I was able to make up my own sentences, specifically targeted at the individual student, starting with handwritten ones, moving on to typed ones and then eventually starting on actual books – again, knowing the student meant that I could look for books that would keep their interest.