Learning literacy skills

Learning literacy skills

1. 6.1 Introduction

   • Literacy learner needs informed and skilled teaching
     • Aims to provide background information to issues in early literacy, and to suggest principles and strategies for classroom teaching based on our current understandings of how children learn to read and write.
       • The reader should be warned in advance that second language literacy is a complicated area and, as far as young learners are concerned, there is much that remains unknown.
         • Literacy in this sense is both social and cognitive.
           • Socially, literacy provides people with opportunities to share meanings across space and time.
             • Cognitively, literacy requires that individuals use specific skills and knowledge about how the written language operates in processing text.
               • Amongst other things, readers and writers need to recognise individual letters, know how syllables make up words, use information from the whole text and the context.
                 • What makes for successful literacy is the integration of information from each of these processes in the larger process of making sense of written text.

2. 6.2 Litercy skills in English

   • The first foreign language distintion is backgrounded. In order to describe first what is involved in becoming a skilled reader and writer in English.
   • 6.2.1 Literacies and literacy skills
     • Literacy skills include being able to read and write different sorts of texts for different purposes.
       • Literacy is part and parcel of everyday life for children and adults, and life is full of different sorts of written texts: in the home, on the street, on television, and on computers.
         • Literacy skills are then, not just an adittional set of skills learnt in schols, but an integral part of people´s lives.
           • An activity such as story-book reading and writing i involved can be described as a 'Literacy event'
             • Participations in litercy events at home provides children with their first experiences of written language.
               • Within the broader idea of literacies lies the narrower, and perhaps more traditional, view of literacy as reading and writing words and texts.
     • 6.2.2 Reading as dependent on visual, phonological and semantic information
       • Embedded in both the broader and narrower concepts of literacy is the idea that reading and writing are essentially about understanding: that readers will understand text that they read by constructing a meaning for themselves, and that writers will try with to ensure that their readers are able to understand what they write.
         • Reading for understanding is more than saying what is written down, on the way to understanding, reading does link to speaking, as written words are 'decoded' into spoken words
           • When skilled readers make sense of written text, they may appear to bypass turning test into talk and go straight to understanding.
             • Fluent readers still have available the skill to speak the words of the text to themselves, the 'voice in the head' (Reid 1990 91), and use it for difficult text or text that need special attention, such as poetry.
               • Reading brings together visual information from written symbols, phonological information from the sounds those symbols make when spoken, and semantic information from the conventional meanings associated with the words as sounds and symbols.
                 • Skilled writing requires mastery of the fine motor skills to form the written symbols are combined to represent words throught spelling conventions.
       • 6.2.3 The unnatural demands of literacy
         • Some of the most exciting developments in early literacy in the last few years have been around 'emergent' literacy and "whole language'.
           • These focus on how children work out for themselves the secrets of reading and writing from participating in literacy events.
             • It is important to remember that most children will need skilled teaching to help them become literate (Reid 1990; Oakhill and Beard 1999).
               • Vygotsky (1978) describes the written language as 'second-order' meaning representation, to capture the idea of two stages between talk and written text in the development of literacy in societies.
                 • Spoken language was used first to represent mental ideas and meanings; in a socio-historical second step, written language was developed to represent talk.
                   • Different societies have produced different ways of writing down talk: English uses an alphabetic system, as does Arabic, but with a different direction; Japanese uses a syllabic system, with the syllable as unit, and a logographic system, in which symbols represent meanings directly.
                     • As the writing form of a language develops, often over centuries, as a tool for representing the spoken language, conven- tions and rules emerge in the use of written forms that then have to be learnt anew by each successive generation of children.
                       • As the writing form of a language develops, often over centuries, as a tool for representing the spoken language, conven- tions and rules emerge in the use of written forms that then have to be learnt anew by each successive generation of children.
                         • In the case of English, some spelling conventions date back to the 16th and 17th centuries, others were imposed in the nineteenth century and, because spelling has been fixed while pronunciation has changed, many of the conventions or rules of the written language do not match how English is spoken today (Stubbs 1980).
                           • Genre theorists have argued that being able to use and understand a range of genres is an important educational goal that will empower children for adult life (Richardson 1998).
                             • Spoken language is used in contexts that offer much support for meaning, often from familiar and helpful adults who know the child and interact with him or her regularly
                               • The writer is much more distant from a reader than is the case with speaking, and this distance can place a high demand on a reader to construct an understanding of the text (Reid 1990).
                                 • The discussion in this section suggests two ways in which teaching can support children in mastering the demands of literacy.
                                   • Firstly, English spelling conventions and the text organisation in some genres are far from obvious and so can benefit from direct teaching.
                                     • Secondly, in the early stages of school literacy, children will need support as they move from the very contextualised use of spoken language to using the more isolated, or 'disembedded', information in written texts.