Adolescent Literacy

Most of the time elementary reading instruction focuses on the actual process of reading rather than reading for "ideas, information, and concepts". When students reach higher grade levels teachers aren't emphasizing the importance of a student's fluency, they are looking for comprehension skills. 

Test scores are not only important for teachers to monitor progress and plan instruction. They are also important nationally and globally. According to NCTE, "the U.S. share of the global college-educated workforce has fallen from 30 percent to 14 percent in recent decades as young workers in developing nations demonstrate employer satisfying proficiency in literacy" (NCTE, 2007).

I was most surprised by the reality of using informal writing to increase student learning of concepts. When you're a student, you often don't have good study skills and you don't see the meaning behind writing a paper "x" amount of pages. I've come to learn that I remember more when I have actually written content down. (E.g. vocabulary, formulas, etc)

When teaching comprehension in the content area, I find that making the reading as engaging as possible helps the student gain meaning. For example, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's I Have a Dream speech is extremely powerful but overwhelming if you read it straight through. In a lesson you could make numbered sentence strips and have the students read the lines breaking them down one at a time. It's more effective if they read it once, read it again while breaking it down, then read it straight through for the last time to fully grasp what Dr. King is trying to say. 

Literacy practices include: vocabulary, fluency, blending and segmenting, and comprehension. 

We are all part of a discourse community. These communities are groups of people who are linked through languages pertaining to a certain interest. I am part of the WVU football discourse community because I know the chants that the fans yell when a good play is made. For example, shouting "Bruuuuuuuuuuuuuuceee!" when Bruce Irvin would tackle someone. If you aren't a fan then you wouldn't know what that meant.

If students' valuable literacy practices are ignored they are going to lose interest in the literary material you are trying to teach. Teachers can help build on extracurricular literacy by allowing students to read or write something that they can relate to. If a student is not interested in Shakespeare, let them write about an author whose books they enjoy reading.

Throughout my schooling I have written many book reports, given plenty of presentations, and been involved in group projects. However I can not remember a single time when I was able to choose my topic. English in high school was awful. Being forced to read Shakespeare and other literary works turned me away from reading for pleasure. I loved to read as a child and I love to read now as an adult. But during those high school years I felt like my interests were ignored. 

In third grade we celebrated the Jewish culture by having a "feast" of different types of Jewish food. I remember we had finished reading a text and celebrated with matzoh ball soup and bread pudding!

Resource:

The National Counsel of Teachers of English. (2007). Adolescent literacy. Retrieved from http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Resources/Positions/Chron0907ResearchBrief.pdf