Product Announcement

PhonicsTutor Phonogram & Phonemic Awareness software is scheduled for release in the second quarter, 2006. It will teach, simulate, and manage a set of Orton-Gillingham phonogram flash cards and provide computer, teacher, and student evaluation to assess mastery. Detailed performance records will automatically formulate lesson plans based on teacher settings for classes and students. This will allow a greater number of students to get the individual instruction they need while providing critical teacher evaluation for mastery.

PhonicsTutor software and books already contain substantial phonemic awareness activities. The SayIt™ Mode in the phonogram lessons is like a set of Orton-Gillingham flash cards that teach the common sounds for the phonograms of English orthography. The student-teacher dialogue and the phonics worksheets in the PhonicsTutor Workbook of Spelling & Grammar teach the spelling rules of Orton-Gillingham phonograms and test the student's ability to apply these rules. In addition, the phonogram to phoneme completion charts test to see if the student knows the phonemes in the order of usage frequency for each phonogram.

For complete mastery of Orton-Gillingham phonograms, students must be able to:

• Recite the sounds of each phonogram in the frequency of usage order from the most frequent to the least frequent. Recitation must be given to a trained evaluator.

• Recite from memory the rules that apply to each phonogram.

• Indicate the list of sounds for each phonogram in the correct order of frequency.

• Use their knowlege of phonograms and phonemic awareness to propose certain or very likely pronunciations of unfamiliar words.

PhonicsTutor Phonogram & Phonemic Awareness software is designed to meet each of these requirements. 

We considered creating a traditional set of flashcards uniquely designed to accompany the PhonicsTutor curriculum. We also considered expanding the phonics worksheets and the phonogram to phoneme completion charts. While satisfactory, both activities would require extensive teacher training, preparation, and instruction time for students to master the phonograms. This is because, in fairness to each student and in keeping with the tradition of the Orton-Gillingham approach, each student must receive individual instruction that is multisensory, flexible, comprehensive, and incrementally successful for each lesson. To meet these requirements, detailed records must be kept for each student and used to plan individual lessons. For some students, the instruction time becomes prohibitive. This daunting task invites a software solution that simulates the phonogram flash card experience. 

By gaining early phonemic awareness using the PhonicsTutor Phonogram & Phonemic Awareness software, students will learn to read and spell words with increased reading comprehension and greater retention. Early phonemic awareness overcomes many reading and learning disabilities. The software will automate many of the tasks traditionally carried out by a trained Orton-Gillingham tutor.  The teacher will still be the final arbiter of the student's recitations based on multiple factors such as student maturity, learning disabilities, and regional dialects. Having a computer teaching, testing, and managing these phonemic awareness activities will greatly reduce the teacher time needed with each student. Orton-Gillingham tutors can use and resell this software to increase revenue and reach more students. Our 12 years experience teaching reading with software has shown us that without a phonics software reading program, the cost of teaching some children with severe reading disabilities is so prohibitive that these children are often disabled for life. The testing for retention of the phoneme list for each phonogram will simulate the paper and pencil experience using an innovative multi-sensory sound indications system. In the past, this was accomplished by dictation of the phonograms as students indicated the sounds on paper. This was a time consuming activity for teachers and tutors. The memorization of the phonogram spelling rules will use a computer-assisted language learning (CALL) system similar to those used for TESOL. This will make the program applicable for English as a Second Language (ESL) students.

Developed for the Microsoft .net framework, PhonicsTutor Phonogram & Phonemic Awareness will be sold as a boxed software solution designed for reading specialists, Orton-Gillingham tutors, and homeschool use.

This product was developed under the Microsoft Empower for ISV's Program. We are using Microsoft^® Visual Studio 2005 with Visual C#.

Copyright 4:20 Communications, Inc. 2005  all rights reserved.