ELN402 Folio Of Literacy Teaching Strategies

Curriculum implementation is founded on the ability to apply strategies relevant to the content in teaching processes. Sources of literacy identified by Thomas (2014) include written texts, spoken texts, and visual texts. Many strategies can be used for a vast range of texts. Literacy strategies feature methodological procedures in form of identifiable steps. Central to literacy strategies, there exist components of literacy addressed in the curriculum implementation process. Nixon (2003) recognizes the existence of learner diversity and emphasizes the necessity of considering effects of diversity in the instruction process.Schmidt (2006) argued that the learners to develop new skills from their learning so that they gain new knowledge and consider the diversity effects in the learning process.

Children come to class with pre-existing perspectives as shaped by socio-cultural environment as coined in Ian, Roberts, LaBonte and Graham (2014). The role of a teacher is to select literacy strategies that can elicit the interest in the learner and nurture their pre-existing knowledge. Application of strategies provides assessment data that can be used for assessment. The aim of this paper is to discussing literacy strategies for teaching by developing the capacity of the teacher to enhance the health and the wellbeing of the student. The individual must enjoy the active lifestyle and movement potential.

 The golden line strategy engages leaders to seek specific points that speak to them (St. Clair County RESA, 2014). This is because golden lines are powerful quotes within the text that makes the discussion interesting to the learners

In the golden line strategy, students are asked to read the article, “Obesity is Everyone’s Business” by Lee (2015) and choose golden lines. The teacher explains to them that golden lines are the quotations in the text or key statements that attract their attention because they have a special meaning to them. After choosing golden lines, students are paired for purposes of sharing their golden lines and discussing their thoughts. The golden line strategy is vital because it helps to identify information about obesity at a glance from the article provided (Schmidt, 2006).

Therefore, these skills play a significant role for the learning process of the students. On the contrary, the expectation that students will read the print-heavy text will not improve their learning skills. Therefore, it is an added advantage for the students those who already have them need to apply them.

Comprehension is evident because students are trying to understand the content they are reading by identifying golden lines. The vitality of comprehension if founded on the fact, it enhances academic and personal learning (Tankersley, 2003). Additionally, the golden line strategy allows students to expand their vocabulary by understanding the words used in golden lines. Golden lines include situated practice as students identify the elements of text that resonate with their personal views; and include overt instruction in the text itself and the explanation of the strategy provided by the teacher.

Oral discussions that occur during pairing and group discussions help shy students to participate in the process of learning because they cannot evade talking to one another when paired and small group discussions. Talented students help other students with learning difficulties (Cruz, 2015); thus, improving their self-esteem. In the first stage of golden line strategy, students work independently; here, the teacher and other fast learners can help students with learning difficulties understand other aspects of the article and how to identify captivating lines.

The golden line strategy helps the teacher to identify what students like most based on the lines that they select. The speed at which they identify the lines also enables the teacher to know the rate at which they skim and understand a text (Zimmer, 2015). This indicates the level of students’ analytical skills.Students are to read and then the teacher needs to guide them on how to create possible sentences using cue vocabularies from the text (French, Sanborn, Dimarco& Stephens, 2016).

The teacher provides a book to the class and asks students to read it in advance; that is before the beginning of the lesson. During the lesson, the teacher allows the students to go through the text again so that they may grasp all the concepts in the article clearly. The teacher then records various words from the text on the board and provides the meaning of these vocabularies to the students. In the next step, the instructor asks learners to construct sentences using each of the words that were listed on the board.

Students are then given a chance to go through the article to find out if the sentences they created are correct or if they need changes; learners may rewrite their sentences when they notice that they did not get it in the first attempt. The teacher then discusses the words with the learners while correcting them for mistakes that they committed. The concept of ‘committing mistakes’ is very dated. Mistakes must be seen as learning opportunities so that students are more willing to take risks to learn. After learners identify their mistakes, they are allowed to create new sentences using the same words again before the teacher steps in to correct those who made mistakes.

Possible sentences strategy addresses situated practice and instructor-student relationship aspects of literacy (Thomas, 2014). An effective teacher and student relationship helps in overall academic growth of the student by increasing their interest in studies. A happy and satisfied student is able to concentrate on study more appropriately and participate in daily activities. Moreover, this also forms a strong and positive relationship between the teacher and the student thereby, making them close to each other. At times, the students feel more feel to share their emotions with their teachers because of the strong bond rather than their parents. As a result, the teacher can provide support and guide the student in the right direction for growth in their life. This helps to develop a secondary Discourse and overt instructions that are observed when students interact with one another and with the article (Gee, 2000).

Again, this approach is very unlikely to help EAL/D students and others with literacy support needs. The task needs to be differentiated to provide help. For example, selected learners are given a variation of the printed text with key words highlighted and annotated (prepared by the teacher ahead of the lesson). If the teacher does not plan, it will not be possible for all students to learn. (Lacina & Silva, 2011). Students with special needs also benefit from this technique because it helps them to grasp words, their pronunciations and their spelling from the teacher and also from the other students.

The teacher is able to assess the student’s ability to write, understand and be able to make use of vocabularies that are related to the topic.

Hannay, Kitahara and Fretwell (2015) described the KWL charts as the graphic organizers that the students use to organize information in relation to what they know, what they learn during a lesson/course and what they learn after the course. KWL charts are vital for engaging students throughout the learning process by activating pre-existing knowledge, learning new content, sharing unit objectives, and monitoring learning (Berry, 2014). Interesting words strategy involves choosing words that are captivating to the student (Thomas 2014).

Students are provided with KWL charts. The teacher asks them to write anything they remember from the article, “Obesity is Everyone’s Business” by Lee (2015), in the first column. This is done individually. After filling the first column, the teacher asks them to write what they want to know in the second column. This is based on what they did not understand well when they read the article or any information that they could have liked to learn about obesity, but was not addressed in the article. The audio, “Dr, Sharma’s Obesity Notes” is played and students asked to keenly listen to the words presented. After the audio is over, the teacher instructs students to write what they have learnt from the video. A comparison is made across all sections of the chart to identify and address any misconceptions, and also assess if students actually achieved their learning needs as specified in column 2. As they listen, the teacher asks students to highlight interesting words they hear. The list of vocabulary compiled in previous lessons needs be updated with these new terms, yes. It is important to review and expand previous concepts, add new ones, and build connections between the two.

The necessary components of literacy are oral language, phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, word study, phonics, word identification, composition, comprehension, vocabulary, fluency and automaticity. However, the literacy development theories are the Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development, Stage Models of Reading, Maturation theory, Family Literacy theory and Emergent Literacy theory.

According to Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development, the individuals start learning language by identification of words and developing an understanding about word composition, comprehension, vocabulary and fluency. According to this theory, individuals learn logical thinking through education gradually. Stage Models of Reading highlights the concept that teachers wanted to see the different stages reader pass while achieving reading proficiency. This provided an opportunity for the teachers to estimate the progress of the students while learning language and its composition.

Therefore, the ability of determining the stage of the readers, the teachers are able to understand and plan the needs to the students. The concept of Maturation theory highlighted how biological impact of the children influences the overall growth of the student. For example, as the brain develops the ability of students to learn increases. Family Literacy theory highlights the involvement of family for the overall reading development of the students over time. The concept of Emergent Literacy theory signifies that the learning process of the children begins at a very young age even before the initiation of official lessons in school. Therefore, this is defined as the acquired reading and writing knowledge of the children even before it is been taught officially. The number of words they are able to identify from the audio clip determines the level of automaticity.

Filling the KWL charts enables the teacher identify needs of each specific learner (Cruz, 2015), thus, presenting the lesson using content and style that will benefit the learners with different needs. Learners’ with support needs can also be identified based on the content they fill in the first column and the teacher can help the students to learn the theories of the Literacy. The components of Literacy help the learners to understand the meaning of the difficult words of the theories and develop their knowledge (Berry, 2014).

The teacher can use KWL charts to assess each student’s level of content mastery.Recall is the most basic of cognitive skills and is often of limited use. The KWL charts help the learners to organize the information before, after and during the lesson. This will provide the opportunity to the learners to develop their higher thinking skills to analyse and justify the lesson. This will help the students to be engaged in new topics, share the unit objectives, and activate prior knowledge and to monitor the learning.

The teacher can make eight steps and can include one or two questions in levels. In the first level question, the learners need to answer in the text directly. In level 2, the students need to understand the concepts and need to draw references from the text. The teacher can set the questions these questions in the class and ask a student read it aloud. At this time other students will write down the questions. Then the needs to play the audio and then he can ask the students to record the answers in their copies. The teacher can play the audio for once more, which will help the students to answer the questions. Peregory and Boyle (2017), playing the audio again will provide an opportunity for the students to answer the questions that have been missed initially. After that, the teacher needs to check the answer. For this purpose the teacher, ask the students to submit their copies in order to discuss the answers in the classroom.

The Question Answer relationship helps to improve the reading comprehensive of the learners. It will help the teachers to ask questions to the student and follow the way of students’ answer. It inspires the learners to think innovatively and work collaboratively to take the challenges and solve them by the higher-level thinking. QAR mainly examines four types of questions. These are the right questions, thinking and searching questions, author of the literacy and the understanding of the learner.

This strategy helps the EAL/D students to be able to read and write in English. The strategy also caters for the students requiring learning support needs. The question answer relationship works with the reciprocal teaching that helps to develop the cognitive skills of the bilingual students. The bilingual students are asked to copy the questions in English and answer them. Then the students are asked to read the answers loudly in class.

This strategy provides information about the ability of learners to read and write in English fluently. It also helps a teacher to assess the ability of students comprehend and to interpret what they have learned accurately. It can be expected that students collect their work over the course of the folio sequence, to be reviewed and edited and for reflection purposes at the end of the obesity topic.

The best literacy strategy for studying the visual text, “The Importance of Diet and Exercise in Reducing Obesity” is Headline It! strategy (St. Clair County RESA, 2014). Students use the Headline It! strategy so that they can develop their thinking. This will help the students to think critically and highlight the important point of the passage at beginning. It will help the learners to develop their innovative power and convey the specific emotion of the learner.

When using this strategy each student comes up with innovative headline to a given video related to obesity. Each student answers different questions such as what message does the video convey, which headline stand best for the given video, the content of the video clip that made the student think of  headline. Once every student has finished developing headlines, the student asks the teacher for actual headline used. This is followed by   classroom discussion where students tend to interpret the different headlines developed. This helps the students to realise what kind of thinking is needed. The other step may involve students to analyse the “headline news photos”. Students are to select a cover photo from a magazine or website news related to obesity. This may be followed by analysing the image for its message, credibility, and logical argument put forward by the image. Based on the analysis the student develops a point of view say “health risk for obesity” and later compares with the actual content from the given source (Brown, 2012).

Headline It! provides allows the teacher to scaffold students’ learning process (Brown, 2012). Through overt instruction (Piwowar, Thiel & Ophardt, 2013), the teacher actively intervenes to help students make sense of things they are learning. Comprehension is evident when students are able to come up with accurate headlines for video (Tankersley, 2003). Accuracy in headlines implies that they listened and comprehended the content of the visual text.

Discussion helps each student to put his or her individual views forward. It boosts their self-confidence and self-esteem due to equal participation by each student (Ian, Roberts, LaBonte& Graham, 2014). Peer pressure and criticism from classmates may trigger higher involvement in critical thinking and developing correct headlines or it may stop some students from contributing at all. Therefore, the teacher needs to offer an alternative to whole-class discussion. Students with lower competence in academics may benefit from the repeated arguments concerning the headlines.

The teacher identifies learners’ perceptive skills and levels of attentiveness based on the accuracy of the headlines that they develop. These can be used for formative assessment of students’ ability to learn.  In this strategy, these students have collected information from many sources but have not used any of it for a meaningful, authentic purpose. To provide balanced pedagogy, critical framing and transformed practice must be evident in this sequence. Then the teacher stops the video at intervals and then asks them to jot down what they have learned about the topic up to that section. This strategy enables students to make sense of the new information and understand it in addition to activating their memory (Lacina& Silva, 2011).

The teacher poses two questions to the students and asks them to use the questions as a guide to jotting down the main points that they grasp from watching and listening to the video. The instructor then starts playing the health documentary 2016 that is on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuujJuu0rJE). The teacher stops the documentary at intervals then asks students to jot down what they have learned about the topic in that section of the documentary. After writing, the documentary is played again up to a certain point then students are asked to record what they have learned again; this continues until the video ends.  Finally, the teacher holds a discussion with the students to find out what they learned from the video; the points that the students missed from the video are highlighted during the discussion.

When the students stop and jot the necessary points, it benefits them by enhancing their communication skills. They have to be a good listener, writer as well as interpreter. This strategy helps them to communicate clearly the visual text into message and symbols for enhancing their communication skills. Eventfully the students become expert in interpreting accurately as well as in evaluating the pooled images and texts in both internet hypermedia and traditional media (Tankersley, 2003).

The stop and jot method helps the teacher to develop alternate strategy for the student who are slow learners and other learner differences. For example, the teacher can separately conduct lessons for weaker ones according to their understanding level. Though teachers have tight schedules are are rarely negotiable, teachers can conduct extra classes for few hours after schools for assistance. Student focused attention may help overcome their problem areas by encouraging and increasing confidence. Teacher may give them additional tips to   jot series of information effectively. This strategy of teachers will help the slow learners without jeopardising the needs of fast learner. For students who are facing problem understanding English dialect especially if it is not their fast language the teacher may present the obesity documentary in simple language. Alternately, the teacher may engage weaker students in reflection and discussion (Irvin, Meltzer & Dukes, 2007). All learners should be enabled to learn at their own pace.

This is the strategy where the instructor can assess the learner’s speed of grabbing concept. It helps to understand how the learners develop their point of view from a given theme.  Based on the accuracy or correctness of the jotted points the educator can understand the differences in perceptive skills and levels of attentiveness among different students in same class.The students need to compose and submit a structured reflection on the concepts of the topic explored over this sequence of lessons. This would be a summative assessment task that should be cross-referenced with specific task criteria by both students and teacher.

The complexity of classroom teaching continues to advance with time. Learners enter the class with a myriad of individual differences, which need to be addressed through proper content presentation for learning to feature the desired effectiveness. The existence of a variety of literacy strategies is meant to address varied classroom needs. Teachers use relevant literacy strategies in relation to the content being presented depending on whether it is written, spoken or visual. To make each literacy strategy effective, teachers should carefully consider literacy strategies, identifying components of literacy addressed, catering for learners’ individual differences and deciphering any information from the students’ responses to the strategy that can be used for assessment purposes. This enables all learners to grasp concepts using various techniques and it helps to minimize the literacy gaps that exist among learners.

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Spoken Text 1: Sharma, A.M (2017). Dr. Sharma’s Obesity Notes. Retrieved from: https://www.drsharma.ca/SharmaMarch6.mp3

Spoken Text 2: Blum, R. (2013). Obesity in adolescence. Youtube. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynGO67G6pUg

Tankersley, K. (2003). Threads of reading: Strategies for literacy development. Alexandria, Va: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Thomas, C. (2014). Inclusive teaching: Presence in the classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass

Visual Text 1: WebMed (2017). The Importance of Diet and Exercise in Reducing Obesity. Retrieved from: https://www.webmd.com/diet/obesity/video/obesity-risks.

Visual Text 2: Mamatova, E. (2016). Health documentary 2016: obesity documentary children’s health crisis NPT reports. Youtube. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BLgHokzeAc

Written Text 1: Bruce, Y.L (2015). Obesity is Everyone’s Business. Forbes. Retrieved from: https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2015/09/01/obesity-is-everyones-business/#72cb442343fa

Written Text 2: French, R., Sanborn, C., Dimarco, N., & Stephens, T. L. (2016). Childhood Obesity: Classification As An Idea Disability. Palaestra, 30(2), 17-26.

Zimmer, A. B. (2015). Activities, games, and assessment strategies for the world language classroom. New York: Routledge.