Literacy:
Literacy in today's world is a more confusing term than in past years. Today's literacy goes much further than simply reading, writing, and understanding written texts. Information comes to students in a variety of forms and at rapid rates through the technological advances of today's times. Students must not only read and make sense of words in many different formats, but must also learn how to discern what they read and interact with the texts to make meaning as it relates to their lives.
Learning to read and write is one of life's most important achievements. All teachers are a major part of a vision for literacy. As educators, we must commit to insure that every child is literate. Competent, caring, and committed teachers create the conditions for learning literacy. To assure quality learning for all young children, all teachers need a foundational knowledge about literacy learning, and they need to apply that knowledge with sensitivity and skill in daily reading and writing instruction.
Literacy instruction should extend into, and be part of, instruction in the content areas of science, history, social studies, literature, etc. In these subject areas, the teacher's responsibility is not only to teach the essential content effectively, but also to explicitly teach students how to comprehend and learn from the texts used in the classroom.
These students have diverse needs, interests, experiences, abilities, learning styles and intelligences. This diversity provides substantial benefits for the students themselves and for the wider community. At the same time, this diversity needs to be taken into account during planning, teaching and assessing processes if all students are to have the opportunity to be successful literacy learners.
To meet the diverse literacy learning needs of students, effective literacy teachers:
- Establish what students know and can do. - Provide opportunities for students to demonstrate their literacy learning in different ways. - Plan for and differentiate literacy instruction to meet students' different learning needs. -Group students responsively to accommodate the diverse range of literacy needs in the classroom, understanding that groupings will change as students' needs change. -Draw upon the rich and varied experiences and understandings that each student brings to the classroom.-Make connections between students' experiences and the learning of new literacy knowledge.- Provide challenge for all students.- Ensure that students are engaged, motivated and encouraged to meet learning challenges.- Provide appropriate and timely support and feedback to students.
Moreover, as I said before, technology has the potential to transform the way literacy is taught and learned in classrooms so that is why I will give special attention to this matter in this blog.
Within the context of literacy lessons/sessions, technology, such as Interactive Whiteboards, Ipads or computers, can be used as a tool to enhance and extend effective literacy teaching and learning.
In a 6th Grade class, for instance, I can enhance literacy by:
-Improving and monitoring comprehension strategies so that students can learn to use them on their own. Some strategies, such as actively relating background knowledge to the text being read, or rereading text when confusion arises, are useful across all subject areas.
-Having extended discussions of a text's meaning. These discussions are designed to help students discover and learn by themselves to use the kinds of thinking processes that good readers use when they actively read a text for understanding.
-Proving systematic and explicit instruction in essential vocabulary. Effective vocabulary instruction must go substantially beyond simple instructions to "look words up in the dictionary." Students should also be taught strategies for independently inferring the meaning of words when they encounter them in their reading.
-Creating a learning environment in which students are motivated to understand and learn from the text. Students who are pursuing meaningful learning goals, developing a project they have helped to design, or working with other students in a cooperative learning group, tend to be more highly engaged in trying to understand what they are reading.
- Facilitating collaborative learning and problem-solving as students contribute their thinking and ideas to a wiki or a blog, share files to create a larger text, or showcase products of project-based learning (Richardson, 2009).
- Facilitating the use of Web 2.0 tools, such as blogs, to synthesize ideas and reflect on learning (Richardson, 2009). Guided literacy teaching supports students to read critically and synthesize ideas, consider audience, clarify the purpose of writing and include their own reflections on content.
- Demonstrating research skills using the internet. For example, the teacher explicitly models how to search for information and check the validity, accuracy and currency of sources.
- Modeling the features of multimedia texts. For example, the teacher and students jointly construct videos, podcasts or web pages that use more than one form of media.
- Making it possible for students to receive explicit guided teaching about using computers as a tool for writing. Students who are comfortable with word processing write longer texts, spend more time writing and revising their texts and produce texts of higher quality (Lowther et al. 2003).
- Allowing peers and teachers to access working drafts and provide feedback using Track Changes and Comments in Word documents.
References:
- Elementary Literacy Plan.A Vision for Literacy.
https://www.lancaster.k12.oh.us/docs/Lit%20Plan%203.pdf
- Melodie D. Fulcher. Effective literacy instruction strategies among teachers in elementary, middle, and
secondary grade ranges.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1534&context=etd
- An introduction to quality literacy teaching.
https://www.decd.sa.gov.au/northernadelaide/files/links/An_Introduction_to_Ouality.pdf
May 14th, 2014.