Reporting Society & Environment is a subject area which lends itself easily to incorporating literacy strategies into its

teaching pedagogy, therefore during my three week professional practice, many of the learning activities I employed were literacy strategies. However for the purpose of this assignment, I will only be focusing on three of the literacy strategies I used during this period. One writing strategy I employed was the making students explicitly aware of different text genres, and modelling how to construct genre specific texts. For example, the year 8 Society & Environment class I taught were required to write a report on national parks in Western Australia. Before they started this in class assignment, they had a lesson on how to write a text in the report genre, which made explicit how the text needed to be formatted and the sentence structures which needed to be used. Additionally, students were given a note making template to aid them in organising the information collected, before they put into the report. I used this strategy even more effectively when I taught three lessons to a year 8 English class on how to write persuasive texts. The approach I took in this lesson was more scaffolded; firstly testing the students prior knowledge of the general essay structure, before explicitly teaching the genre specific characteristics of a persuasive essay. After explicitly teaching the class the characteristics of persuasive texts, I had the students examine an example of a persuasive text and deconstruct the text pulling out the genre specific structures, and describing the effect that these techniques had on the reading. Next, in pairs I had the class construct one paragraph for an essay arguing that school uniforms should be banned. In the final lesson, the students were then required to write an entire persuasive essay on a topic, using the skills that had developed in the prior lesson. The Year 9 Society & Environment I taught were studying Politics & Law, a subject area which dealt with copious amounts of vocabulary, much of which had Latin origins. The previous assignment informed me of the generative roots strategy for vocabulary, which I then employed to aid my year 9s in understanding the vocabulary of Politics & Law. Whenever they encountered a new piece of vocabulary in the text, I would ask them whether they had seen words or word parts which looked or

sounded similar. If so, I would ask them to list them, and provide the meanings. Then, I would provide the students with the definition of the word, along with its history its Latin origins and etymology as well other common words which share the Latin base. Finally, I would ask the students to add the world to their vocabulary list, along with the definition. The literacy strategy I used most frequently during the three weeks was student read alouds, particularly with my year 8 and 9 classes. Typically, I would randomly select a student to read-aloud a passage from the set text, and then have either them or another member of the class explain in their own words what they thought that passage meant. From that point, either another member of the class would be selected to read the next portion of text, or a discussion question would be put forward before continuing on to the next passage. Responding With regards to the genre awareness strategies, I felt the second time I used this strategy was more effective than the first. The second example was a more structured, student centred, and as I mentioned prior, a more scaffolded approach. Students were more engaged with the tasks in the second example, and through deconstructing a sample text were able to process the information about the text genre at a deeper level. This level of engagement can also be partially attributed to the student centred nature of the activities, in which the students are an active participant in their own learning, and also collaborating with their peers. Also through this scaffolding of skill development by having the students starting to deconstruct a prewritten text and the effect it had on them as readers, then construct a small portion of text with a peer, before finally creating a whole text of that genre individually, I ended up with a piece of work which was of a higher quality than if that scaffolding had not taken place. Overall, I found that by examining the generative roots of sometimes difficult vocabulary helped my year 9 class not only in remembering the definitions of these words, but their overall understanding of the content. In Politics & Law, understanding legal and political definitions is a fundamental building block in the understanding of more complicated concepts which are underpinned by the

comprehension of these terms. So if students were able to grasp the vocabulary and understand it beyond a surface level, it greatly aided them understanding more complicated ideas. I found that the read aloud strategies were an extremely valuable part of my teaching pedagogy during my professional practice block, for a number of reasons. The read-aloud activities engaged the entire class with the text, working also as an effective classroom management strategy as well as a literacy strategy. It was also a good diagnostic tool for checking the students understanding of the text, as well as providing an organic platform for further discussion. I found the read alouds most effective when there was discussion questions interspersed between passages of text, as it allowed the students to engage with the content at a deeper level. Also, I found the read alouds resulted in an increase in the quality of written answers that were produced by students, presumably as they were processing the information more effectively if that had been reading individually. Relating As we have examined the aspects of teaching students different text genres in a fair amount of detail in class, my literature review will be focusing on the generative roots and read aloud strategies. Vocabulary Their Way (2010) emphasises the importance of doing walk-throughs of generative roots for vocabulary used in the Society and Environment content area. Shanahan & Shanahan (2008) also examine the importance of having students deconstruct the meaning and examine the origins of the vocabulary they are required to learn. They also commented that all content areas had their own specific language, with vocabulary terms having very specific meanings. Fisher, Frey & Williams (2002) also stated in their study that vocabulary instruction was one of the seven most effective literacy strategies, and that increased vocabulary skills improved literacy across all subject areas. There is a vast amount of literature which discusses the merits of read-aloud literacy strategies. Fisher, Frey & Williams (2002) stated that shared reading was one of the most effective literacy strategies for adolescents as it modelled correct reading. Fisher, Flood, Lap & Frey (2004) and ? also investigates the merits of this strategy. Barrentine (1996) argues that interactive read alouds, similar to what I used in my own teaching, are extremely effective in engaging students with texts. However, Barrentine also

states that in order to have the greatest effect, these interactive read alouds should have some degree of planning imbedded in them. While Barrentines study is focused at primary school students and texts that are centred towards that age group, many of the suggestions regarding planning interactive read alouds are relevant to secondary school audiences. Some of these suggestions include thinking of the learning objectives you have for the students when they read the text, what meaning-making strategies do you want the students to use, anticipating where additional background information could be provided to aid the students in their understanding of the text or make the more relatable to them, thinking about when and how to present discussion questions throughout the text and predicting students answers. Reconstructing In conclusion, I will continue to employ these three literacy strategies, amongst others, in my future teaching practice. With regards to the genre awareness strategies, for reasons as discussed previously, I would take a scaffolded approach which focuses on the gradual development of writing skills by having students deconstruct examples of genre texts before then creating their own texts, both collaboratively and individually. In addition to the literature we have studied in class, I would do further research on effective methods of teaching students to work with genre specific texts, as I believe my own approach could definitely be refined. I would continue to use the generative routes approach to vocabulary as that appears to be a solid strategy and definitely aided my students on prac. Similarly, I would also continue to the read aloud strategy for the reasons discussed previously although I would take into consideration the ideas discussed in Barringtons (1996) work in regards to the planning of read aloud activities. Finally, I would have to continue to embed these literacy strategies on a long term basis in order to accurately assess the most effective method of employing them for my particular classroom context. An action research project, focusing on the implementation of one of these strategies, would be a viable and valuable endeavour for the future.