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Are the student teachers in the BYU program reading specialists?
No, they are pre-service teachers, undergraduate students who are learning what to do about reading problems as they're working with their at-risk children.

What period of time do your student teachers spend with a child?
Although the total semester classwork is about sixteen weeks, they only have six or seven weeks to actually teach with the Touchphonics letter trays.

Now, once you've spent the six or seven weeks teaching phonics this way, does the child need more instruction?
We never have to reteach word structure principles again. It's like a laser beam for a tumor. They don't need to be retaught that words are made of parts which you blend together, or that you match the sound to the symbol and you can substitute the parts.

During this six to seven week period, how many hours of instruction are you talking about?
I'm talking one hour, three consecutive days a week. Now they do not use the whole hour to teach phonics. They teach an awful lot of fluency, with maybe only fifteen or twenty minutes on Touchphonics and then about twenty minutes of using that information in context, reading print. If phonics is the problem, a student will generally make two years growth in fluency within the six or seven week period.

How many children have been taught by your student teachers using this system?
Oh, probably more than two thousand in the last six years.

Is there a time when it's too late to use the Touchphonics system?
No, I have this program running in a community college for adults. In fact, Sarah Johnson, a BYU graduate student, did a well controlled study for her thesis on the comparative effectiveness of three teaching methods. She used 54 ESL adults from about 17 to 50 years old. Each one was randomly selected from the BYU English Language Center and then randomly assigned to one of three teaching methods: traditional, no method, and the Touchphonics system. They were each given a prerecorded pretest followed by 30 minutes of treatment and a prerecorded post-test. The data was analyzed using an analysis of covariance. She concluded that the Touchphonics system was far superior to the other methods with a probability value less than 0.0005. These are similar to the results I got in my studies. The system has also been used effectively on older children in junior high who were struggling with reading.

Do these older kids require more time than say a first or third grader?
No, it takes much less time because they usually have a better understanding of how to use the context to recognize words.

Have you used the Touchphonics system with kids who have dyslexia?
Yes, in fact my original work was designed to help severe dyslexia. We have also used Touchphonics successfully with kids who have cerebral palsy, attention deficit disorders and mild intellectual handicaps.

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