Many systems, tools, methods and strategies have been developed to help students learn to speak, read and write. Some time ago I became acquainted with a system called See-The-Sound/Visual Phonics, developed by the International Communication Learning Institute in Princeton, MN. This system has proved to be effective in helping my students whose speech and literacy skills don't seem to improve through traditional methods.

Visual Phonics is a multisensory approach for improving speech, reading and writing skills that can be used with students of various ages and diagnoses, including learning disabilities, mental challenges, hearing impairment, and speech and language disorders. The approach can be used to facilitate speech through the development of articulation skills, reading through the development of decoding skills, and writing through the development of spelling skills.

The program utilizes 45 hand cues and written symbols to represent different sounds. There is a one-to-one correspondence among hand cues, written symbols and the sounds they represent. The hand cues suggest how the sound is made, and the written symbols are a visual representation of those cues.

For example, the hand cue for "w" is made by pressing the four fingers to the thumb in a flattened position, with the palm facing toward the mouth, then opening quickly. The written symbol is drawn as five lines radiating from a common point to represent the fingers closed together and then opening, thus depicting the "w" sound.

The same hand cue and written symbol always represent the same sound. For example, the same hand cue and written symbol would be used for the different spellings of the long "o" sound in the following words: soap, toe, snow and so. The hand cue for the long "o" is the hand rounded into an "O" shape at the mouth. The written symbol is O.

Writing the written symbols under the words allows the students to see the patterns more clearly. The consistent representation of sound and the use of written symbols under the words help students identify the relationships between sound and various spelling patterns in our English language/print system. Students then can use this knowledge to learn rules for decoding and encoding words more readily.

Visual Phonics can be incorporated easily into already established speech, reading and writing programs and the materials being used. I incorporate the approach into articulation therapy. While work- ing on articulation skills during speech sessions, the students acquire target sounds with greater ease and at a faster pace when hand cues are used, I have found. In addition, they maintain sounds more efficiently and are able to generalize production to different contexts with less prompting.

Visual Phonics enables the speech-language pathologist to prompt production in a less obtrusive manner and to fade verbal models quickly. The approach also provides students with a way to cue themselves in order to increase self-correction of articulated sounds. I have seen less regression and more progress in articulation skills with students who have special needs as well as those in the general education program.

If students misarticulate their target sounds when they return to school after a long break, I only have to use the hand cues; and they immediately produce the sound correctly again.

The program also can be used to improve phonological awareness skills. Developing phonological awareness is very important in the reading process, research has shown.

I have incorporated Visual Phonics into the following activities to facilitate development of phonological awareness skills for students in kindergarten and the early grades: rhyming words, phoneme counting, phoneme identification, phoneme segmentation and phoneme manipulation/deletion/addition.

When presenting rhyming words, hand cues and written symbols are used so the students can see and hear the similarities and patterns in the words. For phoneme counting activities, Visual Phonics is paired with verbal production of the word to allow the students to see a discrete number of sounds in words as well as to hear how many sounds are in the word.

The program provides visual cues that allow students to see and hear individual sounds when identifying sounds in beginning, medial and final positions of words. The visual cues help students to recognize if a word begins or ends with the same sound or a different one.

In the sequencing and segmentation of sounds in words, pairing hand cues with the oral production provides visual, tactile and kinesthetic cues, which help students better remember the sequence of the sounds in words and more effectively retain it in long-term memory. Finally, using Visual Phonics during phoneme manipulation, deletion or addition activities allows students both to hear and see the changes in words more clearly.

In our resource classes Visual Phonics is used to supplement phonics skills and decoding and encoding activities in programs such as the Wilson Reading System. The program moves the students to a higher level of decoding and encoding with greater expedition, we have found. It helps to clarify what sound they are hearing and/or saying and what letter is associated with it. Students are able to internalize the English sound system as related to printed words, thereby facilitating the sounding out and spelling of words.

As students participate in sound drills as a warm-up to decoding, hand cues can be paired with the presentation of the sound to provide multisensory cues. During an encoding drill, the teacher can simultaneously present the hand cue with the spoken sound or word for students to write. Because students see and hear the word, they spell the words correctly more often.

Visual Phonics provides a method for students to identify sounds and their printed letters without verbal prompting from the teacher. It allows students to prompt themselves in recalling sounds and their graphemes. Once sounds are internalized, the cues are faded so students read, spell, and speak like their peers.

This approach allows the reader to see, feel and experience sound. The learning are active, not passive, so they retain more.

The program can be learned easily and incorporated into most reading, language and speech programs. It can be combined with existing material and individualized for students. Finally, this approach helps to build positive self-esteem as students realize they really can learn to read, spell and speak.

Vanessa Wilson is a speech-language pathologist and Alisa Dennis is a resource teacher at Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland. Wilson, who also is a resource specialist and certified trainer for Visual Phonics, can be contacted at Vanessa_L._WilsonFavors@fc.mcps.k12.md.us or vlwf@aol.com.