Literacy across the Curriculum for JHS

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LITERACY ACROSS THE CURRICULUM

Literacy Across the Curriculum (LAC) means that students are learning literacy skills while learning other content areas like mathematics, integrated science, social studies etc. Whether it is listening to directives, reading a passage, writing a response, or discussing a point of view, the individual student’s ability to perform and grow in a classroom rest squarely on his/ her corresponding language capacity. The reading, writing, speaking and listening strategies are necessary for student engagement across disciplines. In the world of formal education, these strategies are requisite at every level. The need to read, write, speak and listen effectively is fundamental to every subject in every grade and in every class these learners will ever attend.

Every standardized text, whether it is internal or external, is first and foremost, a reading test. Therefore, if a student cannot read mathematical problems, then s/he cannot do them. Explanations of mathematical procedures and principles are written in words and sentences so if students cannot comprehend basic prompts like ‘divide’ or ‘multiply’ or ‘square root’, then he/she will fail on the test item.

Misconceptions of Literacy Across the Curriculum

 

· Teachers of language are responsible for literacy

· Literacy is all about reading and writing

·

 

Why is the study of Literacy across the curriculum important?

 

1. Learning in any subject requires the use of language; thus reading and writing are used as tools for learning that subject area.

2. Connecting literacy learning to other content areas reinforces learning in all areas.

 

Principles and Practice of Literacy Across the Curriculum

 

1. Revising and explaining the role of all teachers (all subjects and levels) so that they see themselves as language teachers.

2. Separating vocabulary into three distinctive types with distinctive instructional approaches in every classroom.

3.  Building creative notetaking strategies for extraction and reaction as opposed to a passive-receptive approach.

4. Designing and employing consistent editing and revision policy for writing for every class on a developmental (basic 4-6) basis.

5. Using a formal approach to speaking skills through discussion types that are assessable.

6. Employing direct technical instruction that promotes the use of the human voice and body as a speaking and communication instrument to develop posture, confidence, and power for each student in the classroom.

7. Employ group work/presentations to reinforce speaking skills.

 

 

Strategies for improving speaking skills across disciplines

 

1. Let students work in groups.

2. Encourage students to practice selective attention.

3. Let students do note-taking.

4. Let students do self-assessments after presentations.

5. Use question-and-answer techniques in teaching.

6. Let students memorize and recite texts.

7. Let students re-tell stories.

8. Create opportunities for students to read to learn vocabulary and/or grammatical structures.

9. Provide role-play opportunities for experiments with language.

10. Make students read aloud.

11. Help students have self-talk and simulated conversation practice with peers.

12. Value the home language of the children.

 

Classroom activities and tasks for practicing speaking skills.

 

1. Dialogue: This is a technique used for practicing functions of language such as greeting, agreeing, disagreeing, apologizing, suggesting, and asking for information.

2. Role Play: this is a technique used to practice speaking. There are three types:

i. With clues

ii. Totally guided

iii. Free types

3. Discussion/Opinions: This technique is used to ask for ideas on topics

4. Group work/Problems: As learners walk together to solve problems they use language.

5. Visual Comprehension: The learner will be provided a picture and after careful observation, they are asked some questions.

6. Rhymes: This is a play way method of learning a language.

7. Songs: Learners enjoy songs and it can be used for developing speaking skills.

 

The Concepts of Listening

 

Listening is an active process of hearing. It involves paying attention to sound and making meaning out of the way it has been composed. Listening is one of the most basic communication skills. About 70% of our daily communication involves listening. Listening is the main channel of classroom instruction and the most used language skill at work and at home. Many learners want to develop effective listening comprehension because it is crucial to their academic, professional and personal success.

Reasons for Listening/ Kinds of Listening

 

1. Listening for information (Information/Comprehension)

2. Listening to evaluate

3. Listening to empathise (therapeutic)

4. Listening for enjoyment/pleasure (Appreciative)

 

 

Role of Listening in Language Acquisition

 

1. It is the first essential language skill because it is the first tool for language acquisition, we learn to listen first before we learn to speak, read and write.

2. Listening plays a role in learning language and any branch of knowledge. Attention to form of voice, pitch and accent reinforces comprehension.

3. The overall role of listening in language acquisition learning is to help people to communicate with each other without difficulty.

Perspective of Listening

 

Listening can be viewed from three (3) different perspectives. These are:

 

1. Bottom-Up: listening is a process of interpreting/ understanding sounds a person hears in a linear way. That is; sound-words- phrase- clauses-sentence-text. This involves using the incoming input as the basis for understanding the message. Here, comprehension begins with the data that has been received which is analyzed as successive levels of organizations- sound, words, phrases, clauses, sentences-text-until meaning is arrived at.

Here, the listener’s lexical and grammatical competence in a language provides the basis for bottom-up processing. For example:

Sentence: “The Ministry of Education in collaboration with the Ghana Education Service has rolled up a new curriculum for basic schools in Ghana, and this new curriculum takes effect in September 2019”.

In order to understand this utterance using a bottom-up view, we have to mentally break the utterance down into its components. This is called ‘Chunking’. The chunks arrive at the core meaning that the proposition carry. At the end of the day, it is the units of meaning that we remember and not the form in which we initially head them. Our knowledge of grammar helps us to find the appropriate chunks, and the speaker also assists us in this process through intonation and parsing.

Teaching Bottom-up Listening.

 

Learners need a large vocabulary and a good knowledge of sentence structure to process texts bottom-up.

Listening activities for Bottom-up

 

1. Dictation

2. The use of multiple-choice questions after a text

3. Close listening (fill-in).

 

 

NB: Activities that require close and detailed recognition and processing of the input and which assume that everything the listener needs to understand is contained in the input.

Bottom-up Skills enhanced through:

 

1. Identify the referent of pronouns.

2. Identify keywords that occurred in a spoken text.

3. Identify which modal verbs occurred in a spoken text.

 

The top-down perspective of listening

This refers to the use of background knowledge in understanding the meaning of a message. Eclectic perspective

This refers to the judicious combination of bottom-up and top-down perspectives of listening.

 

How to help learners develop good listening skills

 

1. Provide enough listening opportunities. E.g watching Television/ movies, radio.

2. Use think-aloud (in the course of listening, stop and ask students what they are thinking) and help learners to use a variety of strategies.

3. Organize pre-listening activities

4. Provide a purpose for listening

5. Use authentic materials. E.g. Dialogue, Lecture, etc.

 

 

 

Developing listening activities

 

In developing listening activities for our students, we must bear in mind the following:

 

1. Construct the listening activity around a contextualized task-real life task.

2. Define the activity instructional goal and type of response-the goal should be the improvement of one or more specific listening skills. Listening activities should not overburden the students.

3. Check the level of difficulty of the listening text. Ensure the materials are appropriate to their level. Pretext information in a natural chronological order. The text should have visual support.

Format for a Listening lesson

 

1. Pre-listening: Predict questions; keywords; prior knowledge

2. While listening: Play the recording twice, and let students reduce their writing.

3. Poor listening: Activities to help learners act upon what they have heard to classify and extend their thinking-asking questions; summarizing; reviewing notes.

Teaching listening

 

What to text?

 

· Specific skill

· Main ideas

· Drawing conclusions.

 

Assessing Listening

 

Dictation Multiple choice Close (fill-in) Short answers

Paraphrase/ summary

 

Components underlying speaking effectiveness

 

1. Grammatical competence-the knowledge of grammar, vocabulary and language conventions.

2. Discourse competence-the learner’s ability to produce coherent speech, the ability to put words, phrases, and sentences together to produce contextualized speech.

3. Sociolinguistic competence- the appropriate use of language. That’s what is expected socially and culturally.

4. Strategic competence- the knowledge of the techniques and strategies which can be used to deal with a lack of fluency. The learner’s ability to use appropriate communication strategies according to the context in which the communication takes place.

 

 

Components Underlining Speaking Effectiveness

 

 

READING

Reading can be defined from different perspectives, but the ultimate explanation one can give to reading is ‘making meaning out of printed material.’ Reading involves words, phrases, clauses, and sentences. These constructions are all based on information. The kind of information contained in the material and the purpose of the writer, and reader determines the kind of reading that is done. One may see reading as any other subject, but reading goes beyond that. Reading is the basis of academic work. If one cannot read, there is no way that person can write

Components of Reading

 

There are components that underlie reading and the teacher and learners must bear in mind during the teaching and learning process.

Vocabulary: Vocabulary as a component of reading is one’s ability to identify and eventually mention words in a passage. It is the reason why teachers drill pupils or students on selected vocabularies that they deem or find difficult for the students. Teaching vocabulary in reading comes in two ways and these are explicit instruction (drill), which involves someone telling you how a word is pronounced and what its meaning is. The other way is through context clues which help the reader to find the meaning of the words on the basis of how the words are used.

Fluency: Fluency in reading is a reader’s ability to read with speed, accuracy, and rhythm. There is a direct relationship between one’s ability to identify and mention words (vocabulary) contained in a text with his or her ability to read at a faster speed or pace. This is because a reader’s ability to pronounce words in a text easily contributes to the rate or the speed with which he or she reads. Fluency also informs understanding.

Comprehension: Comprehension is one’s ability to understand what he or she reads. It is more than just understanding words in isolation. Comprehension is the most complex component of reading because it involves all the other components of reading. There is, for example, a direct relationship between a reader’s fluency and his or her comprehension. This is because a reader’s ability to read in a faster pace usually depicts that he/she has grasped the meaning of what he or she is reading whereas a slow reader uses a lot of time to understand what is before him or her, and it implies that the reader does not understand the vocabulary that is contained in the text to bring out the meaning.

Types of reading

 

There are styles of reading that are more useful in some contexts, and less so in others. The four most important of these styles are:

· Extensive Reading

· Intensive Reading

· Skimming

· Scanning

 

Extensive Reading

 

Extensive reading involves learners reading texts for enjoyment and to develop general reading skills. It refers to the reading for joy. This approach supports reading as much material in your target language as humanly possible. This way readers will be exposed to the widest range of vocabulary and grammatical structures. All of this is supposed to make the reader a better language learner and help you on the way to fluency (smoothness). To read extensively is to simply read as much as possible, without concerning oneself with the meaning of the unknown word. This is done by reading for large swaths (bands) of time, and looking up words only when you consider it absolutely necessary to your understanding of the text. Extensive reading is meant to be a fun and pleasurable experience, requiring a low expenditure of mental effort. The more extensive reading you do, the more language you are exposed to, allowing you to increase your passive knowledge of vocabulary quite quickly. Specifically, if you wish to read a text extensively, you must read texts that are interesting, level-appropriate, and of moderate length, to read when you can dedicate longer blocks of time, and to do so when you are relaxed.

Important aspects of extensive reading:

 

· Texts must be interesting. Since extensive reading is done for longer periods of time, you must take care to select texts that hold your attention, and keep you coming back for more, hour after hour.

· Texts must be level-appropriate because you must be able to understand a high percentage of a text before you even begin. The goal is to absorb unknown words through context therefore if you don't understand the bulk of the context, the text is not yet appropriate for you to read extensively.

· Texts must be of moderate length. Specifically, a text should be on average at least 15-30 pages long. Texts of this length are long enough to fully develop an idea or narrative and require you to keep mental "track" of ideas, concepts, or characters as they develop over time.

Intensive Reading

 

Intensive reading: It refers to reading carefully for an exact understanding of text. Necessary for contracts, legal documentation, application forms, etc. Intensive reading involves learners reading in detail with specific learning aims and tasks. This approach helps language learners really understand the language’s grammar and syntax. The proponents of this method use a range of exercises to complement the reading itself. To read intensively is to completely deconstruct (analyze) a text, with the goal of absorbing as much meaning from it as possible. This is done by taking a text, and systematically (thoroughly) looking up every word, phrase, or collocation that you do not understand. This activity requires great mental effort and focus. Because of this, the learner who engages in intensive reading must be careful to follow specific guidelines or else risk dullness and stress (burnout). If you wish to read a text intensively, you must take care to read texts that are interesting and short, to read only for brief periods of time, and to do so when you have the most mental energy.

Important aspects of intensive reading:

 

· Texts must be interesting, because if you do not enjoy what you read, you will quickly forget the content, and have more mental resistance to the intensive reading process. Texts must be short because the end goal is to understand the text. The longer a text is, the more laborious it is to complete such deep analysis, so it is better to stick to shorter texts in order to avoid mental exhaustion.

 

 

Skimming

 

Skimming is a reading technique meant to look for main or general ideas in a text, without going into detailed and exhaustive reading. In skimming, a reader reads only important information, but not everything. This technique works effectively in non-fiction materials, newspapers, and long novels. To get a gist of the text, a skimmer reads the introductory paragraph, the topic sentences of paragraphs, and notices pictures, graphs, charts, titles, headings, subheadings, italicized and boldface words, and their illustrations, and makes a mental picture of the text after viewing this information. He then transforms this picture into a summary.

Scanning

Scanning a text is a reading technique where the reader looks for specific information rather than trying to absorb all the information. Scanning is aimed only at finding the necessary information in the text. It does not mean a complete immersion in the text and deep comprehension of the facts, or analysis of grammatical constructions. Often in this mode, the text is viewed for the presence of unfamiliar words, so that after their translation it will be easier to read the text fully.

WRITING

Writing is the process of using symbols (letters of the alphabet, punctuation, and spaces) to communicate thoughts and ideas in a readable form. Writing is a medium of human communication of a language with symbols.

 

Types of Writing

 

1. Expository

Expository writing’s main purpose is to explain. It is a subject-oriented style of writing, in which authors focus on telling you about a given topic or subject without voicing their personal opinions.

2. Descriptive

Descriptive writing’s main purpose is to describe. It is a style of writing that focuses on describing a character, an event, or a place in great detail.

3. Persuasive

Persuasive writing’s main purpose is to convince. Unlike expository writing, persuasive writing contains the opinions and biases of the author. To convince others to agree with the author’s point of view, persuasive writing contains justifications and reasons. It is often used in letters of complaint, advertisements, or commercials.

 

4. Narrative

Narrative Writing is a piece of writing that tells a story. It can be essays, fairy tales, and jokes. Writers use a narrator style, a point of view, and other strategies to tell a story.

 

Process Involved In Writing

There are two types of processes involved in writing: Product writing and Process writing.

 

Product Writing

 

Product writing is concerned with the result of the writing and not how it was done. This product approach to the teaching of writing emphasizes the mechanical aspect of writing, such as focusing on grammatical, and syntactical structures and imitating models. This approach is primarily concerned with “correctness” and the form of the final product. The product approach to writing largely concerns the forms of the written product that students compose.

 

Process Writing

 

Process approaches concern the process of how ideas are developed and formulated in writing. This approach to writing is where language learners focus on the process by which they produce their written products rather than on the products themselves.

1) The stage-model theory. This viewpoint sees the writing process as a series of distinct. Sequential steps: prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, evaluating, and post-writing.

 

Prewriting or Planning

The first step of the writing process is the prewriting or planning stage. During prewiring, you think about the topic, brainstorm, focus and develop a working thesis.

 

Drafting

The Drafting stage is the next step in the writing process. During this stage, students use the information from the prewriting stage and craft it into a rough draft. The goal is for students to take the jumbled thoughts that they had brainstormed and put it into actual sentences. This is the stage in which students do not have to worry about spelling, grammar, or any punctuation. They are free to expand their thoughts into fluent sentences that make sense.

 

Revising

The third step of the writing process is revising. During revising, you should read your writing and look at the content. You can think of revising as looking at the big picture. Here, do not worry about the mechanics of the paper, but focus on the content.

 

Editing

Editing involves tidying up the text as the final draft is prepared for evaluation. Editing involves taking a critical look at grammar, spelling, punctuation, examples, and the like.

 

Evaluating

This is a stage where the piece of writing is inspected. Sometimes grades or scores may be assigned.

 

Post-writing

This is done after evaluation, it can be in a form of publishing, sharing, reading aloud or stage performance

Components of Writing

 

Central Idea: It is the topical issue(s) that a text or a passage talks about and it directs the text from start to finish. All other parts of the text must contribute toward the central idea. It is the idea that controls the text and it is also the theme or the subject matter of the text. For instance, when you are to write about the causes of an accident, all the information in each paragraph should talk about the causes of the accident from beginning to end and in this case, the causes of the road accident are the central idea of the passage.

Organization: Every piece of writing should have an organized structure, which is the structure of the text. It should comprise an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. The introduction should give an overview of what the text or writing is going to talk about. The body of the text should also contain paragraphs that contribute directly to the controlling idea or the main idea or the central idea. The conclusion also summarizes all that the text has spoken about.

Supporting material: The claims that we make in a piece of writing, which is the information that we give or the ideas that we talk about should be accompanied with evidence. A good text is one that is able to support its claims or concept with proven materials. These proven materials may come in the form of examples or quotations. This helps the reader to be able to trace and find out the evidence for him or herself. Information that is given in a text should not be left ajar as it cast a lot of doubt in the readers' minds.

Expression: The intention or motive of every writer is to inform, educate, and entertain. This is done or achieved through a medium. The medium through which the intention of the writer is conveyed to the reader is through the use of language. For a text to be able to communicate meaningfully to a reader, it depends on the choice of words that have been employed in it. It is very important to make sure that the choice of words that we use in our text is clear, specific, accurate, and free from other structural and rhetorical errors.

Spelling, Grammar, and Punctuation: Apart from diction, spelling, grammar, and punctuation marks are elements of writing that contribute towards the general understanding or comprehension of the texts. A text that has a lot of spelling mistakes becomes very difficult for readers because it affects the pace of reading and also forces the reader to think for the writer as to what exactly the writer wants to put across. A text that is made up of grammatical errors also goes a long way to affect the coherence of the text in general. Wrong use of punctuation, on the other hand, also leads to difficulty on the text. It is therefore very essential for all writers to gain mastery over their spelling, grammar, and the use of punctuation marks in order to promote a better understanding of their text.