Abstract:

In this paper we present a methodology to teach illiterate adults to read.
More than 37 million people in Latin America can neither read nor write, representing a 10% of this region population, thus it is worthwhile concentrating on the application of this methodology to increasingly achieve that more people have the possibility of being themselves included with dignity into the social and economic life of their country.
Spanish is an alphabetic writing system having a nearly perfect one-to-one correspondence of symbols (graphemes) to individual sounds (phonemes). Generally, in Spanish, words are spelled the way they sound, that is to say, word spellings are almost always regular.
Given that most of the Spanish phonemes correspond to a single grapheme, the proposed method is based on establishing possible correspondences between phonemes and graphemes, looking at the words as the combination of both levels: the graphical and the phonic ones.
In our system, audiovisual resources are used to associate reading with the assembly of different pictures putting together parts taken out of a set of pieces of different shapes, like a jigsaw puzzle: in this case, the pieces, instead of forms, are the letters. Besides being graphical, the resulting structure has a distinct sound: the combination of phonemes that compose it, the one of a word.
Classes and exercises are presented to the students in a gradual and pleasant way.
The didactic objectives of each lesson are supported by images, color and movement. Examples and practices are nourished from the students’ vocabulary.
The present version was developed using simple resources which allowed testing the effectiveness of putting into practice the idea. Currently it is delivered without sound, as support for instructor-led training (ILT). There is the possibility of redevelopment with increased resources, as to different modalities according to audiences. Examples of the above mentioned include the existing films on the first lessons.
Experiences made in dictating the classroom based course, with the support of the developed material, were highly satisfactory.

Keywords:

literacy, spanish, methodology, multimedia, adults, course, software.