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Lets talk a bit about how much knowledge you need to teach reading using the Touchphonics system.
Okay. If I show a group of classroom teachers these trays of letters, they immediately recognize the benefits. When they see it, they say, "Oh, I can use that . . . I've got some kids who need it." That fast.

How long would it take a teacher to learn to use the Touchphonics system to its full potential?
Oh, between four and six hours. That's all my student teachers get. Then they practice with the child.

With the Touchphonics system how many students can you teach at one time?
I can teach three at a time. Two can be taught easily, with three, they'll have to wait for a turn.

When did you begin to develop the Touchphonics system?
The first two years of development were when I was earning my doctorate. Those two years were spent designing the letters. I made my first letter set out of dental material. I have a brother who's a dentist and so I made molds out of the powder he used to make dental plates, for every one of the letters and combinations. Then I color-coded them and used them with the children. At that time I was a resource teacher.

What year are we talking about?
This was '83 and '84. I spent two years working with the kids. The way I developed this was with children. I did not develop it from theory but from years of teaching and the research I did for my dissertation. I was with the kids and I was a resource teacher and I was working on my doctorate at the same time. I had some kids who were very severe, and nothing I had would work for them, so I kept trying this thing and that thing. Finally I decided I needed letters and I needed them to be concrete, and I colored them so that my students would see them in patterns. It worked just beautifully! It was incredible how the system helped these kids, so then I began refining it. I turned it over to other resource teachers to try. I wanted to know if it was a viable breakthrough, so I shared it in a public school district with a lot of different resource teachers. They used it and that's how I documented the effectiveness of this system for my dissertation. I did pretests and post-tests. The results were significant enough to make a real study.

What happened then?
After I finished my dissertation and my doctorate, I worked for the Utah State Department of Education in the Special Education Department. I then returned to California as a reading specialist again, in Hayward. There are 43 different languages spoken in the Hayward School District, so I was working with ESL, Chapter I, and learning disabilities children. That was very successful. Then about six years ago, I returned to Brigham Young University where I conducted reading labs. I've been working with about 400 different children per year for the last six years. Teaching those undergraduate BYU student teachers is what made me have to be able to explain what it was I was doing. I've refined the letter grouping so that the Touchphonics system doesn't fall apart under this word or that word, and this rule or that rule.

How did you measure the results? How did you know that a given student would not have been as well off had he or she not used this system? Do you have a benchmark or test?
Yes, we have a group of diagnostic, informal tests that we use at the beginning of the semester. We test each child on the reading components, for example, reading enjoyment, language, comprehension, fluency, and study skills. I have designed tests which indicate weaknesses and strengths in these specific areas. We do a pretest and then we work with the kids. If they're low in oral language, then we work with that. If they're low in written language, we work with that. The data I have shows word recognition/phonics and oral language/sentence structure are the weakest areas for the majority of these kids (pointing to her chart). And, because Touchphonics teaches all of these things, (parts, patterns, and principles) at the same time and does it concretely, the results are pretty dramatic. If comprehension is the student's problem, just word recognition/phonics won't fix it. Teaching phonics alone won't fix comprehension, because comprehension comes from total language. If the child has a fluency problem, though, I'm going to go back here (referring to her chart) to word recognition, and I'm going to find out which way they're able to recognize words, and if using the context is strong, then I'm not going to remediate oral language/vocabulary/sentence structure. If, on the other hand, spelling is weak, I'm going to remediate phonics. That will help them recognize words the way they don't now, which will increase their fluency, which is going to increase their comprehension. So, directly teaching phonics will help spelling. Indirectly, it will help word recognition, which will help fluency, which will help comprehension.

So, let me understand. At the beginning you would test a number of students, and those who were weak in the phonics area, you would take aside and use your Touchphonics system with them.
Exactly. You work in the area that is the cause not the effect of the weakness.

What system did you measure against?
Traditional classroom instruction and small group interventions. You see, when I get them, let's say in third grade, they've been in the classroom. They've used workbooks, or whatever the teacher has given to them, and have experienced the regular remediation. The students they send me in the reading lab are the kids who are not making it in the classroom. So they're falling further and further behind. We inventory their language arts skills individually, to see what specific problem they are experiencing, and then we remediate wherever they are having difficulty. Then we go back and post-test to see what progress is being made.

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