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Go up and down the ladder
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Photo by Samuel Zeller on Unsplash
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Reading involves both top-down and bottom-up processes (Campbell, 2004; Grabe, 1991). Research has shown that honing bottom-up skills will greatly help literacy learners lighten their cognitive burden and focus on understanding reading texts in the future (Trupke-Bastidas & Poulos, 2007). Therefore, adult literacy teaching should include both types of reading processes, and Vinogradov (2008) calls this "going up and down the ladder" (a.k.a. Whole-Part-Whole). The "whole" (top-down) focuses on meaning while the "part" (bottom-up) focuses on the text (e.g., phonemic awareness, phonics, sight words, and grammar).
Among different bottom-up ("part") foci, phonics has caught my attention the most. Once a LESLLA learner told me that it was hard for her to remember English words because she did not write Chinese, her first language. She was sitting among learners who could write Chinese and was troubled when she saw them writing down Chinese words to help them remember English pronunciation. From my observation, the method did not work well. After a whole lesson about don'ts, these Chinese learners were unable to even recognize the word don't. They relied too much on their Chinese and did not pay enough attention on the English words. In contrast, on the same day the LESLLA learner with no L1 literacy read aloud some English sentences to me and she did a marvelous job! My mentor teacher and I agreed that phonics (understanding sound-letter relationship) is a great tool for vocabulary and pronunciation learning and can considerably reduce their reading/learning anxiety too.