North Salt Lake, UT, February 4, 2015

To better prepare pre-service teachers to teach reading, Reading Horizons has been working with college and university professors to make its online training tool available to students for free. With Texas Southern University being the most recently added partner, 50 colleges and universities now use the Reading Horizons Online Reading Workshop to train pre-service teachers. By providing this service, they help educators begin their careers with the knowledge and strategies needed to teach emerging and struggling readers.

The Workshop simplifies the challenge of teaching reading by providing a framework of strategies that show students how to read. With this framework, which includes the Five Phonetic Skills, Two Decoding Skills, and the 42 Sounds of the Alphabet, any educator can simply explain the rules of the English language to beginning readers, struggling readers, and ESL students.

Recognizing that pre-service teachers can sometimes have difficulty finding time for professional development, Reading Horizons has designed the workshop to fit even the busiest of schedules. The 6-hour training course can be saved and paused at any time.

Click here to learn more about using the workshop in your college or university ›

The workshop is also friendly to university professors’ schedules. According to Dr. Brian Ludlow, a professor of reading and elementary education at Southern Utah University, the workshop “enables professors to expose teachers to the basic fundamental skills of phonics instruction without encroaching on class time at all.”

Upon completing the workshop, participants can take an assessment to prove their understanding of the material and receive a certificate of completion that can be submitted for free professional development credit.

The workshop can also be used by other educators that want to learn strategies for simply explaining the rules of the English language to beginning readers, struggling readers, and ESL students. Every educator is allotted 30 days of free access and customers have unlimited access to the workshop.

Click here to learn more about using the workshop in your school or district ›

The workshop is aligned to most key curriculum standards, including those outlined by the International Reading Association, the International Dyslexia Association, Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards, and the National Council of Accreditation in Teacher Education.

About Reading Horizons:

Founded in 1984, Reading Horizons provides teacher training, teacher’s manuals, and interactive software that empower teachers to effectively teach beginning readers, struggling readers, and English Language Learners. By learning the core of the Reading Horizons framework (The 42 Sounds of the Alphabet, Five Phonetic Skills, and Two Decoding Skills), students have all of the skills they need to read the vast majority of words in the English language. The Reading Horizons program is currently offered in over 10,000 schools across the country. Follow Reading Horizons at www.readinghorizons.com.