At the University of Southern Mississippi . It was devised originally by the late Mildred McGinnis, a teacher at Central Institute for the Deaf in St. Louis. It has been modified and expanded by Etoile DuBard and the staff of The University of Southern Mississippi's DuBard School for Language Disorders during forty years of the school's operation.
Children learn to read manuscript, but write only in cursive.
The Method is implemented in a manner that is incremental and systematic. Instruction progresses from the teaching of individual sounds to syllables, words of gradually increasing length, basic sentences and questions, more advanced sentence structures and the corresponding questions. Ultimately, when sufficient language skills have been achieved, a transition is made to traditional textbook formats for instruction. The use of two colors indicates the number of phonemes in the word and where one phoneme ends and the next phoneme begins. A modification of the Association Method has been used effectively in regular elementary classes.