Why Is Literacy Important?

Motivation will be key for my literacy program. I know that if the students are highly motivated then they will learn more readily. I will build motivation in my classroom by having a positive, warm learning environment. I will have a variety of literature of different genres and of different levels within my classroom. I will also have a variety of areas and centers for the students to participate in.

Beginning with phonics is an important factor when learning to read. Having the alphabet around the room with examples are ways that helped me connect letters and sounds. Other ways to teach student’s to find connections with letters and sounds are rhyme books, poem books, and songs. Showing my student’s the passion and enthusiasm for reading will encourage students to be passionate readers. I would model this by reading aloud to my student’s daily for a short period of time. After reading we will discuss what we read and our feelings on the subject. Learning vocabulary and expanding student’s word knowledge is something I want my students to explore. I want to introduce students to multiple genres and to be able to find meanings and structure to the words and sounds. I believe by enhancing student’s vocabulary it helps them to become better communicators in the future. I can promote vocabulary my displaying word walls and having a library and dictionaries available around the

I hope to encourage reading with focusing on vocabulary and spelling and monthly reading goals. Being able to see words and knowing the meaning is important but also the time spent reading is important. They have seen the words before and then they have the meaning which informs their understanding of the material. I will also encourage audio books while reading a book while fiction or non fiction. The students will be able to hear the words as well as see them and put them to together.

The importance of learning how to read and write is called, literacy. “Oh my gosh! I want to rip my hairs out!” I told myself this as I was writing a research paper in the eighth grade. Reading and writing used to feel like a chore, until one day when my English teacher saw me struggling and was determined to help me enjoy it if not even love it.

The Literacy course will help you improve your reading and writing skills, as well as, help you to better understand different forms of text. Which will help you succeed through many areas of your life. Your communication skills within the community will improve, better job opportunities will be available to you, and your relationship with your family will also benefit from you having a higher level of literacy. I believe literacy is a very important part of a happy and successful life.

The word literacy to me, is being able to comprehend what a group of letters would mean together, basically is having good comprehension skills. One of many ways we can understand literacy, is to relate the word literature with every writing we do or read. Not only that, but in the world of literacy, having good writing skills can help the reader understand what you’re trying to get across. Even though literacy is associated with letters and words, a picture can also be a good example of it. When we see the logo of Facebook we know what it means, even though if it doesn’t have the complete word, our brain made the connections until your mind associated with the actual word. If you really think about it, we use literature in every part of our

At the beginning of the school year, I set a reading goal for myself for the first quarter. This goal was definitely attainable for me, but I knew I would have to put some effort into it. My independent reading goal was to read over 480 pages and to read a book by an author I had never read. This goal did challenged me in a way where I knew I would have to make myself read even when I didn’t want to, but it was not a goal that challenged me a ton. I believe that this was a good first quarter goal, but I look to build on it over the course of the year.

For literacy instruction to become consistently taught and utilized throughout all subject areas as well as grade levels, teachers first need to identify aspects of the curriculum that connect with various types of literacy. For example, when studying genetic testing in Science, students can read three different viewpoints with pen in hand and then participate in a debate representing an assigned or chosen position. Literacy is required to be authentic and engaging such as the genetic testing debate above. As a future administrator I envision a generous amount of instructional time devoted to purposeful reading, writing, and talking, the essentials of authentic literacy (Schmoker, 2006, p. 53). To assist teachers in developing authentic literacy within students, I would first ask them to use common

People build themselves in a world that is building them through their choice of words and actions; an important factor of a person’s identity is the way he/she speaks or spoken (Shor, 2009). Critical literacies enable students address social issues in their real world using their interests and experiences from the literacy perspective (p.176). Learning literacy become meaningful for students as they become participants and active citizens, rather than passive spectators, isolated by unfamiliar and meaningless text (p.176). Critical pedagogy help students to intercept real-world problems by crafting authentic texts, aligned with their concerns and interests and communities (p.179). In Michael Apple’s view, this could also be called as ‘democratic

The intention for FAST to be math and science focused does not mean that literacy is a secondary goal; it means that STEM concepts are integrated into the literacy equation for our students. Literacy encompasses three components for students; Reading Workshop, English Language Arts (ELA) and Writing. These subjects will be taught as a block, particularly in the early grades when students are progressing from learning to read, to reading to learn, so that students have more opportunities to link the concepts together.

Literacy pedagogies have a developing and complex history in education, intertwined with social and cultural change and evolution. Each change has paved a new path for more significant approaches and strategies, which cater to diverse learners allowing them to create meaning and communicate more effectively. These literacy pedagogies brought out by the changes in education have both strengths and weaknesses. As such, educators need to explore and understand the four knowledge processes portrayed by Kalantzis, Cope, Chan and Dalley-Trim; didactic, authentic, functional, and critical literacy approach (2016), to be able to consider how they can influence teaching and learning so they are able to make informed decisions with regards to their students’ literacy learning. Teaching is becoming increasingly complex; this is particularly evident in the area of literacy. This paper will explore the four literacy pedagogies, their limitations and their strengths, and how they have impacted literacy learning within the Australian educational context.

The Four Resources Model supports teachers in designing an effective primary, literacy-learning classroom environment. More importantly, it permits students to become communicators in correlated, or interdependent elements of language use (Cambridge Assessment, 2013). This significant approach to literacy describes the accessible resources children require to be literate, which include code breaking, text participating, text using and text analysing (Luke & Freebody, 1999). The Australian Curriculum is a fundamental foundation. It ensures beginning, emergent, or competent students are learning various language features, comprehend diverse text types and can analytically evaluate the purpose of writing and reading. Critical stages and skills include sound recognition, or oral language acquisition and functional grammar (Cambridge Assessment, 2013). Hence, emphasising an initial focus on engaging students and the significance of teacher modeling to build knowledge of the field is identified (Leslie S. Rush, 2004).

Literacy is a vital skill necessary to thrive or even function in today’s society. Researchers estimated that 25% of American students had mild to severe reading problems (Margolis, 2004). Reading problems can emotionally devastate children and compromise their future. A lot of professional literature focuses on preventing, identifying, and remediating reading problems.

As a child, I never had books read to me. It was not really part of the middle-class lifestyle in Punjab, where I was born and lived for 5 years. In Punjab, I completed two years of early education known as LKG (lower kindergarten) and UKG (upper kindergarten). The school I went to, although a high SES school, did not have a library where we would go to read picture books. Moreover, the books we did have for ‘English’ were a compilation of poems and stories, with very few pictures. Poems or story was read by the teacher, and then told the ‘moral’ of the story. Nothing more. Neither was there any extrapolation nor exploration of character or plots. Although, it was taught in school it was still a second language for me.

It is important for families to develop awareness and consciousness of literacy skills, strategies, and behaviors, so they support their child along his or her literacy journey. Currently, the first, second, and third grade teachers are using guided reading and writer’s workshop during their literacy instruction to provide an individualized approach to learning. After examination of the PARCC and Developmental Reading Assessment (DRA) data for the past three years, literacy is an area of concern for Truman School. The DRA is administered twice a year, in the fall and spring. The number of students reading on grade level significantly drops by third grade. For example, following the same cohort of students, 78% percent of first grade students were reading on grade level during the 2014-2015 school year. By third grade only 39% of students were reading on grade level for the 2016-2017 school year.