Determine the student's specific needs in terms of eyesight, hearing, socio-economic status, memory capacity and readiness to learn and develop strategies to be used for the duration of your instruction. Use large letters, plain fonts in no less than 12-point type, excellent lighting and touch to help students with eyesight problems. Use gestures and shorter sentences and keep your face and mouth visible at all times when dealing with students with hearing issues. Do not shout at the student, and do not change the subject matter abruptly. Use clear-cut material and audiovisual materials, especially with students who may have trouble grasping concepts. Use simple, consistent vocabulary words, repetition, visual cues and references and short lessons for students with memory problems, usually by introducing no more than three to five new points per session, according to the Ohio State University Medical Center. (Reference 1)
Determine how instruction will be most effective. The Partnership for Reading suggests using individual, small group or classroom instruction but suggests that small groups may be most effective.
Help the elderly student articulate their learning desires based on their individual needs. Ask them about specific instances in which his or her inability to read has held them back and use those instances as starting points and/or goals in your lesson. Identify needs the student may have in general functional literacy, workplace literacy and/or family literacy. Use their life experiences to supply material for lessons. (Reference 1)
Assess the student's abilities in alphabetics, including awareness of phonemes (smallest units of sound) and word analysis, as well as language fluency, vocabulary and comprehension, as suggested by the federal government's Partnership for Reading initiative. Though the suggested method of assessment is via a standardized reading comprehension test, you can use a few methods to get a baseline for the student's abilities. Test the reader's fluency by asking them to read a short passage as rapidly as possible and counting the number of words read in one minute. Use this number as a baseline and use the same passage to retest the student periodically. Administer a word identification test, and then an oral vocabulary test.
Teach phonemic awareness by using letters and focusing on identifying, isolating, categorizing, blending and segmenting phonemes. Use systematic approaches that focus on regularly spelled words. For example, have the student identify the first sound in the word "bug," which is /b/. Then ask the student what the common sound is in "paper," "pig" and "plus," which is /p/. Then, ask the student which word does not belong in "ran," "rake" and "cab," which would be "cab" because of the /r/. Ask the student to blend the sounds of /s/ /k/ /u/ /l/ into the word "school." Finally, ask the student how may phonemes are in the word "lip," and they should answer: "Three. /l/ /i/ /p/." (Reference 3)
Use phonics, which is the strategy to teach decoding. Decoding is the skill that uses letter-sound correspondences to recognize words. Introduce common letter-sound relationships such as "ate," "ack" and "dge," per the Partnership for Reading's recommendation. Have the student sound out the words, and then attempt to integrate the word with their existing vocabulary. Point out that some words may sound one way when vocalized but are actually pronounced another way, such as "bed" and "bead." Teach the student to use context clues to determine the meaning of the word. (Reference 3)
Teach fluency by having the student repeatedly read passages of text, words from texts and other text units, the Partnership for Reading suggests. Use modeling, simultaneous reading, assistance, correction and/or a combination of these. Use audio tapes with corresponding written texts and instruct the student to follow along and highlight any words that are unfamiliar or that they find interesting. (Reference 3)
Teach vocabulary by using texts in which the student is interested, and pre-teach words that the student will encounter in the text. Also, according to Partnership for Reading, teach the student vocabulary words that will be useful to them in workplace or family settings. Introduce prefixes and suffixes, such as "un" and "ly," and show the student how they can use these in addition to their knowledge of root words to determine the meaning of a word. The Partnership for Reading asserts for instructors to focus on teaching signal words ("before," "therefore"), homophones ("their," "there"), homographs ("read," "read") and the like. Introduce a dictionary into your instruction, . (References 2 and 3)
The Partnership for Reading suggests teaching reading comprehension by integrating materials that are relevant to adults and adult life and spending at least 70 percent of class time reading and writing. Read aloud to students and talk through your thinking processes. Summarize difficult passages, point out pronoun references and odd spellings and break down and define long words. Ask the student to read passages and have them stop and restate what they read in their own words. Ask the student to read to themselves and highlight or mark words or sentences that they don't understand and go over these with the student. Teach students to draw graphic organizers to aid in comprehension. (Reference 3)