My world on the web
The value placed on literacy has changed over time, shifting from a nineteenth-century moral imperative to a twentieth-century production necessity.
“Literacy was irrevocably transformed from a nineteenth-century moral imperative into a twentieth-century production imperative,” Brandt concludes, “Transformed from an attribute of a ‘good’ individual into an individual ‘good.’”
This reminds me of Doug Belshaw’s work on digital literacies and how what this means can vary.
This presentation will explore plurilingualism and the ways it can be used to enhance the teaching of EAL students.
This was a useful presentation as I am not sure I had ever properly thought about plurilingualism. It really has me rethinking ways in which I support learners. The challenge is to be aware of this and make it an active process. Associated with this, there needs to be an effort to promote a more positive perception about achievement. Rather than students struggling, they are on a developmental pathway. In the end, this all highlights the ways in which literacy not static, but something that is ever evolving.
The real WHY for Literacy is about creating a more just and equitable society for all.
I have no intention to get into a ‘phonics vs …’ debate because I don’t understand why it has to be phonics vs anything. Why can’t it be phonics + other things? Reading is a complex act that involves not only working out what the squiggles on a page say but also what they mean directly and through implication. Phonics definitely has an important role to play but I’ve also experienced students who arrive in Grade 5 believing they are star readers because they can decode every word of complex text yet can’t tell you a single thing about what they’ve read. I’m also dubious of any method being suggested that involves a whole class of students sitting in front of a teacher repeating sounds over and over with no consideration of what they already know. Where I’ve seen direct phonics instruction be particularly effective it was with small groups of students where sounds and the required practise could be targeted to their needs and gaps.
Your point about going beyond the phonics debate is important. One of the best things that I have been a part of is disciplined collaboration. Although the intent was to improve aspects of literacy, the prime focus was to work collaboratively to identify strategies for the context at hand. I sometimes feel that those who jump to THE solution, whichever it maybe, are unwilling to allocate the time and resources to build the capacity of those in the classroom.
In regards to your closing question:
Are literacy levels actually dropping or is what being literate looks like changing in our modern, digital world?
I am reminded of something that Clive Thompson said in Smarter Than You Think:
Before the Internet came along, most people rarely wrote anything at all for pleasure or intellectual satisfaction after graduating from high school or college. This is something that’s particularly hard to grasp for professionals whose jobs require incessant writing, like academics, journalists, lawyers, or marketers. For them, the act of writing and hashing out your ideas seems commonplace. But until the late 1990s, this simply wasn’t true of the average nonliterary person. The one exception was the white-collar workplace, where jobs in the twentieth century increasingly required more memo and report writing. But personal expression outside the workplace—in the curious genres and epic volume we now see routinely online—was exceedingly rare. For the average person there were few vehicles for publication.
What about the glorious age of letter writing? The reality doesn’t match our fond nostalgia for it. Research suggests that even in the United Kingdom’s peak letter-writing years—the late nineteenth century, before the telephone became common—the average citizen received barely one letter every two weeks, and that’s even if we generously include a lot of distinctly unliterary business missives of the “hey, you owe us money” type. (Even the ultraliterate elites weren’t pouring out epistles. They received on average two letters per week.) In the United States, the writing of letters greatly expanded after 1845, when the postal service began slashing its rates on personal letters and an increasingly mobile population needed to communicate across distances. Cheap mail was a powerful new mode of expression—though as with online writing, it was unevenly distributed, with probably only a minority of the public taking part fully, including some city dwellers who’d write and receive mail every day. But taken in aggregate, the amount of writing was remarkably small by today’s standards. As the historian David Henkin notes in The Postal Age , the per capita volume of letters in the United States in 1860 was only 5.15 per year. “That was a huge change at the time—it was important,” Henkin tells me. “But today it’s the exceptional person who doesn’t write five messages a day. I think a hundred years from now scholars will be swimming in a bewildering excess of life writing.”
2/ And for all the handwringers, there are (& have always been) homes where there are no books, papers or magazines. Are devices not one way that these children are now exposed to text? I’m not a fan of uncritical embrace of technology in schls but some more balance wld be good
— Linda J. Graham (@drlindagraham) November 11, 2019
A new exhibition traces the remarkable evolution of writing. Cameron Laux picks 12 highlights offering insights into one of humanity’s greatest achievements.
The way we speak is very different from the way we write – especially from the way we write continuous prose. When we speak, we hesitate, we contract phrases (as with “wouldn’t’ve”), we repeat ourselves, we often leave gaps for others to fill in. Or we might just tail off. We use intonation and gesture to indicate or colour meaning. We use more pronouns than we do when we write, because we can specify who we are referring to with gesture and tone. We use a lot of ums and errs and “you knows” to give ourselves time to think or to hold a listener’s attention. And we avoid front-loading sentences with phrases and clauses that delay getting to the main point.
Critical media literacy has readers interrogating text to examine and challenge the dominant power structures that audiences work to make meaning between the dominant, oppositional, & negotiated readings of media.
Listening to a book club selection is not cheating. It’s not even cheating to listen while you’re at your child’s soccer game (at least not as far as the book is concerned). You’ll just get different things out of the experience. And different books invite different ways that you want to read them: As the audio format grows more popular, authors are writing more works specifically meant to be heard.
Discipline–specific literacies (literacies that are specifically needed in a discipline, for example, by an historian or a lawyer, in order for them to work effectively in their fields) have been the focus of much research. Content area specialists build knowledge in their field. They use ‘invisible’ and important literacies that go beyond traditional writing text, spelling, punctuation and other conventional literacies. These include other modes (such as collaboration or demonstration) or semiotics (signs, marks) present in different subject areas.
A broadened view of text is needed to consider the various forms and modes of text in our world. These might include text in a printed book, a street sign, a video game, a YouTube video, an animated GIF, audio podcast, etc. We can no longer look at only one form of text as “correct”, and all other forms of reading and writing as not involving true literacy practices.
I am continually asked: why are we are once again adopting UK policies and accepting as ‘evidence’ the Rose Report from the UK? This report recommended that synthetic phonics be the preferred method for teaching early reading in the UK, but the ‘evidence’ quoted in the report has been widely disputed, including in the UK, by highly respected literacy education experts. The way the report has since been used politically is of ongoing concern.
This was the impetus for the Sydney School of Education and Social Work at the University of Sydney to hold a symposium on The role of phonics in learning to be literate last week in Sydney in conjunction with The Australian Literacy Educators Association.
Learning to be literate is crucial for children’s life chances.
Socioeconomic status has a big impact on how well children read
Learning to be literate is a highly complex contextualised social practice – not a series of hierarchical skills
Learning to read is about making meaning. There are no easy, one size fits all recipes.
Rich literature, real texts should play an important role in any literacy program
Phonics and other code-based literacy practices are widespread in early years learning contexts in Australia. Where is the evidence that teachers aren’t using these strategies?
Another test is highly problematic and will disadvantage our EALD (English as an additional language or dialect) learners as well as many in vulnerable situations
