Building Comprehension
Below is a list of a number of strategies that you can use to help boost your student’s comprehension skills. Each of these strategies helps your learner read a paragraph, figure out how to better understand it, and take action to remedy difficulties. Try some of the suggestions in each of the different strategies until you determine what works best [Read on...]
Lesson Plan Evaluation Study
Meredith Gravett, a student at Brigham Young University working on her Master’s degree in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages), needs your help! She would like at least seven tutors to participate. If you are interested, please contact Project Read.
Meredith describes this research process as follows:
For my project I am writing seven lesson plans for Project Read tutors [Read on...]
Just Write! Guide
After two years of research, Teaching Excellence in Adult Literacy (TEAL) has released a guide that helps adult basic education teachers with evidence-based writing instruction. This guide has many interesting ideas that are aimed at promoting and improving writing, the thought process around writing, and how to enhance overall instruction. Click here to go to the guide online.
Click here to [Read on...]
Tutor Tip: Why Spelling Is So Difficult
President Andrew Jackson once remarked, “It’s a d____ poor mind that can think of only one way to spell a word!” Many Americans would readily agree. In fact, the English language is notorious for its spelling irregularities. Only about half of our spellings exactly match their sounds.
What a crazy system, in which the word fish could be spelled as “ghoti.” [Read on...]
The Change Agent
This issue of The Change Agent, breaks new ground. Done in collaboration with September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, it teaches the history of 9/11, wrestles with important legal and moreal questions related to security and liberty, examines the “rule of law” in the context of terrorism, [Read on...]
Getting Information into Memory, continued
Learn By Doing
Many teachers have a feeling that people learn better by doing, but what evidence is there? Five experiments where people heard words, watched an experimenter do something, or did something themselves, showed that “doing” has a powerful effect on learning. Those who “did” remembered from 1/3 to 2 times more than those who just heard, and they remembered [Read on...]
Working Memory and Learning
Principal: Working Memory Helps All Learning
Talking to Myself Again….
A word can last in working memory for about 2 seconds without any work. To keep a word in working memory, you need to rehearse it, as in the example above of remembering a telephone number. Working memory stores words using a king of “talking to yourself” (although your mouth does not [Read on...]
Literacyconnections.com
Are you a new tutor? Have you been to your training meeting yet? Do you feel a little overwhelmed with the responsibility to help your student succeed? You might want to check out Literacyconnections.com. This website is full of tips and activities for tutors who are helping their students learn how to read. There is a section specifically called ‘tutor [Read on...]
Financial Literacy
http://financialplan.about.com/od/budgetingyourmoney/ht/createbudget.htm
Creating and implementing a budget is a hands-on process that internalizes and exposes your students to beneficial everyday financial vocabulary. Read the article (link above) about creating a family budget with your student; the article is a simple seven-step approach in creating a basic functioning budget. Please help define any unfamiliar words your student may come across. You may help [Read on...]
Working Memory and Learning
Principal: Working Memory Helps All Learning
“Without learning, there is nothing to remember, and without memory, there is no evidence of learning”—Kay L. Huber, Nursing Professor
Questions for Teacher Reflection
How do you remember a phone number after looking it up in a phone book?
Do your students ever get to the end of a sentence and forget what the beginning of the sentence [Read on...]
