|
How Schools Can Help Students Acquire Literacy Skills
By Mark Forget, MAX Teaching, Inc
Excerpt from: MAX Teaching With Reading and Writing, by Mark A. Forget (2004)
(See also: 2004 Building Bridges Conference handout)
What can schools do to help middle and high school students improve their achievement in learning? The systematic use of reading and writing to help students learn their subject matter is one answer. Students who are placed in an environment in which they are allowed to pursue learning through the means of reading, writing, discussing in cooperative groups, and thus manipulating ideas to construct meaning are finding that learning does not have to be difficult or boring. Rather, it can be fluid and engaging-even exciting.
What students in such an environment learn is that, despite their background or home environment, they can succeed as learners. A collateral benefit is that, while students in content area classes read, write, and discuss in order to learn content, they actually improve the thinking skills directly related to higher performance in reading and writing.
Much of current research into motivation of students involves two simultaneous and often competing drives within the learner - striving for success and avoidance of failure (Marzano, 2003). What the teacher does in the pre-reading phase is based on the awareness of these two drives.
Each class begins with activities designed to motivate students to become engaged in the learning of content, even if it is content that is difficult or might not otherwise interest them. This first step is accomplished through the systematic use of both individual and cooperative activities that help the teacher to
- find out what the students already know about the topic to be studied,
- assist students in connecting to and seeing the relevance of subject matter,
- provide for increased conceptual understanding for all students,
- introduce and model a literacy-related skill that the students will use to probe text and gather information for development of new understandings, and
- help students establish concrete purposes for actively probing the text.
Frequent systematic guided practice in literacy related skills allows students to acquire the skills without even being aware that they are doing so. Just as a person acquires fluency in a language through the immersion process by living for some time in a place where the language is spoken, students acquire complex and content-specific literacy-related skills.
Acquisition is different than learning - most people who ever tried to "learn" a second language through years of course work cannot speak it. Yet people who were given the opportunity to spend lengthy periods in foreign lands often acquire the language without formal training. It is this less observable yet profound form of development that is occurring in a content literacy classroom through immersion in reading, writing, speaking, listening, and thinking about course content.
Using literacy skills to process new understandings can easily become the central focus of a classroom and can be used as a way to learn any new information. The variety of tested strategies available to teachers is enormous. Researched and proven strategies abound. Thus, practicing literacy skills to learn should not be a once-a-week or once-a-month activity. It can become the routine of a classroom in which students are engaged in making personal meaning from text and discussion every day.
Back to previous page
|
