Pauline Gibbons - Chapter 3 - Literacy in the Curriculum lyrics

What does it mean to be "literate"? Think for a moment about how you would define the term literacy. Sixty years ago it was described in the following terms (and note that it refers only to reading): Reading means getting meaning from certain combinations of letters. Teach the child what each letter stands for an he [sic] can read. Phonics is taught to the child letter by letter and sound by sound until he knows it--and when he know it he knows how to read. (Farr and Roser 1979, 13, referring to a 1955 definition of literacy) Success at school would be much easier for students if that was all they had to do to become literate! This definition suggests that become literate is something that once achieved is completed once and for all. Yet all of us can think of examples of how literacy learning goes on throughout one's lifetime. We are always being apprenticed into new forms of literacy (nowadays of course including the multiple modes of technological literacy)... In the same way, we need to recognize that what for us may be familiar forms of literacy, whether reading or writing, may not be so for our students. For them, as the previous chapter suggested, the reading and writing tasks they undertake in the middle years represent unfamiliar ways of using language, and so being shown explicitly how to read and use these new forms of literacy is essential if they are to eventually use them for themselves. -------------------- Literacy in the curriculum Language and content are inextricably entwined. Understanding terms like probability and Permutation is inseparable from understanding the mathematical concepts they refer to, just as understanding the term photosynthesis cannot be separated from understanding the biological process it refers to. Subject-specific literacy is also closely tied to the ways of thinking and reasoning, and ways of reading and writing, that are valued in a particular subject. As suggested in Chapter 1, each subject "packages" knowledge differently from the everyday, spoken ways of using language. It also packages this knowledge in a different way from other academic subjects: each discipline has it's own conventions and patterns of thinking that make it distinct from others. These differences include the reading of different types of texts and the use of different text structures, presentation formats, and ways of organizing language. As we saw in Chapter 1, so much academic language is subject related that it is probably more accurate to talk about academic literacies rather than academic literacy. Developing the spoken and written literacy of a particular subject is key to performing well on tests and a**essments in content-area learning. But it is also key to being and effective and independent learner in any intellectually challenging work. Being subject literate means understanding how the "big ideas" of the discipline are organized and evaluated and is thus related to being able to think and reason in subject-specific ways: think for example of the differences between carrying out an inquiry in science or in history or in social studies. Or consider the differences in what counts as central to the discipline. As a subject teacher, think about how you would answer the question, what is history really about? Or math? Or science? ---------------------- What makes academic language difficult? Spoken and written language There are important differences between spoken and written language that are potentially particularly challenging for EL learners... Halliday and Hasan (1985) refer to these contextual factors as field, tenor, and mode: Field refers to the topic of the text. Tenor refers to the relationship between speaker and listener (or writer and reader). Mode refers to the channel of communication, whether it is spoken or written. Together, these three variables constitute what is referred to as the register of a text. As children learn language, they gradually learn to vary the language they use according to the context in which they are using it. In other words, they learn to vary the register of the language so that it is appropriate for the context. That is just what children do at school of course, when they learn to use the different kinds of language a**ociated with becoming literate in a range of subjects. One of the most significant things they learn to do as they move through school is to learn to talk, read, and write about an increasing range of subjects (or fields) in an increasingly abstract and impersonal ways (using a more formal tenor and expressing what they have learned largely through the written mode). The fact that language, by its nature, varies according to context in this way is one of the most powerful arguments to teach EL learners through a program that integrates content and language learning. In an integrated program the curriculum provides a ready-made context for teaching the specific language for learning that is required by learned to participate in mainstream subject learning in authentic and meaningful ways. -------------------- Two features of academic language Two features of academic language that make it distinct from the everyday face-to-face language with which learners are likely to be familiar. These to features are nominalization and nominal groups. Understanding the structure of these two features of written English will help you recognize a major factor in what makes academic language difficult for your students, and so help you support your students in understanding these features in reading and using them when appropriate to their own writing. Nominalization This process of changing verbs into nouns is called nominalization. Nominalization serves a particular and very important purpose in English: It allows a writer to structure information so that he or she can express abstract ideas... Nominalization becomes increasingly important as students move through primary and secondary school. Textbooks use it to package more information into sentences and discuss subject-based abstract concepts. Increasingly as students move through high school, they are expected to use nominalizations in their writing to demonstrate that they understand the more abstract concepts in these subjects. However, using nominalizations is not a case of using complex language simply for effect! Rather, it allows the writer to focus on key abstract ideas rather than on persons and events. Nominal groups The other way that written academic language "packages" information (and this is another source of difficulty for students new to a subject) is to make use of a group of words, often a very long group of words, that represent a single thing but carry a great deal of information... Scientists recently discovered a fossil of a giant penguin, Icadyptes salasi, a fearsome beast with an 18cm beak, powerful wings, and a chunky neck. Extended groups of words like this, referring to a noun, are called a noun group or a nominal group. Of course a nominal group may be much shorter than this, consisting of just two or three words: the writer could have simply written a fossil of an enormous penguin. An easy way to recognize a nominal group is to see if you can replace it with a pronoun like it, he, she, they. (And anytime you need to remind yourself what a nominal group is, just think of the penguin!) Because dense language carries a large amount of information, it may cause comprehension difficulties for students if the content is not already familiar; this in turn may create barriers to successful reading. Therefore the learning of new concepts must start with cla**room talk around what students already know in terms of the content, drawing on the everyday language with which they are likely to be familiar, and with concrete examples from everyday life (see Chapter 4). The development of academic language and the English language standards must become a part of broader subject-learning objectives and outcomes.