21ST CENTURY LITERACY

PED 204. 27june2019

OUTLINE
________________________________
• Introduction
• The Changing Nature of Literacy
• What Content Area Teachers Need to Know about
Academic Literacy Learning
• The Role of Academic Discourse
• Comprehending academic texts
• Cognitive and metacognitive strategies affecting literacy
learning
• Framework for Adolescent Literacy Instruction
• Components of Literacy Development
INTRODUCTION
 INTRODUCTION
The 21st century literacy demands the ability to understand, interpret,
and discuss multiple texts across myriad contexts (International Reading
Association, 2012)
• Adolescent learners who are proficient in 21st-century literacy possess
the following skills:
• Ability to reason, analyze, and communicate effectively to pose,
interpret, and solve a variety of problems
• Fluency with multimodal texts
• Ability to author words and images in fixed domains as well as multimodal
settings
• Interaction with text in discipline-specific ways within and across subject
areas
 THE CHANGING NATURE OF
LITERACY

Integrated view of reading,

writing, and oral language as
tools for knowledge
English Language arts and Relationship between
acquisition, effective
literacy language and content
argumentation, and
communication across all
disciplines
 WHAT CONTENT AREA TEACHERS NEED TO KNOW
ABOUT ACADEMIC LITERACY LEARNING

In order to be active members of a disciplinary community, adolescent

learners need to:
a. Understand the sign systems used in each academic subject area
e.g. symbols in Math
periodic table of elements (Chemistry)
 WHAT CONTENT AREA TEACHERS NEED TO KNOW
ABOUT ACADEMIC LITERACY LEARNING

Notes:
Signs are representations of something else, such as words to convey
concepts or a painting to symbolize a theme (McCormick 2011).
 Each academic discipline has its own sign system that is socially negotiated
and is constantly changing as knowledge is constructed (Bean & O’Brien
2012/2013).
Skilled readers are able to engage in TRANSMEDIATION, or the process of
translating meaning across different sign systems.
e.g. decoding a poem’s central theme and then create a video to convey
its central concept
 THE ROLE OF ACADEMIC DISCOURSE
Academic Discourse
- is the act or result of making a formal oral or written communication
on a subject (Harris and Hodges 1995)
 THE ROLE OF ACADEMIC DISCOURSE

Notes
 As adolescent learners engage in academic discourse, they must understand how
texts are complex, social negotiations of discipline inquiry and are constantly
changing as new tools such as technology emerge
 A key skill for disciplinary literacy is the ability to think metadiscursively, which is to
identify different types of academic texts and to recognize their specific
characteristics (Wilson 2011).
 adolescent learners must understand the oral and written forms of communication
used by content area specialists (Moje 2008)
 teachers play a critical role in scaffolding this development as they guide classroom
discussions, encouraging students to unpack content, exchange ideas, and create
new texts in different modes
 COMPREHENDING ACADEMIC TEXTS

Ways:
• Engage in accountable talk about content area topics
• Collaborately make sense of text
• Internalize each discipline’s vocabulary
• Explicit modeling of disciplinary literacy
 COMPREHENDING ACADEMIC TEXTS

Notes:
 Fluency in disciplinary literacy requires readers to think, write, and communicate in
the discipline
 Engaging students in productive discussions about content leads to growth in
comprehension and learning
 Effective communication instruction across disciplines is a systematic approach that
uses myriad types of texts, carefully sequenced, to develop prior knowledge,
academic vocabulary, and content-specific types of inquiry methods.
 Skilled readers of disciplinary texts use explicit comprehension strategies such as
asking questions, making predictions, testing hypotheses, summarizing, and
monitoring for understanding
 COGNITIVE AND METACOGNITIVE STRATEGIES
AFFECTING LITERACY LEARNING

Metacognition – is an awareness of one’s own thought processes

Skilled readers are proactive while reading and engage in a three-phase

cyclical process:
1. Readers set a purpose for reading, activate prior knowledge, and establish
a time line to meet their goal.
2. Skilled readers monitor their processing of text and select strategies to fix
their comprehension issues as they arise.
3. Skilled readers self-reflect on the process and note ways to improve their
understanding when tackling a similar text in the future.
 COGNITIVE AND METACOGNITIVE STRATEGIES
AFFECTING LITERACY LEARNING

Specific Method for making the metacognitive process explicit to

struggling readers and those with special needs is the THINK-ALOUD.
The think-aloud strategy is when the teacher pauses while
reading text to demonstrate how prior knowledge was tapped or how
a difficult word was defined from context or other comprehension
strategies
 FRAMEWORK FOR ADOLESCENT
LITERACY INSTRUCTION
Systematic Framework
- focuses on self-regulated learning to navigate multimodal texts

Develop disciplinary learning communities to

collaboratively and strategically approach literacy
 FRAMEWORK FOR ADOLESCENT
LITERACY INSTRUCTION

Foundational Skills

Discipline Learning Communities

Strategy Instruction for Self-regulation

21st – Century Literacy Skills

Fig 1. A Framework for 21st –Century

Adolescent Literacy
 FRAMEWORK FOR ADOLESCENT
LITERACY INSTRUCTION

Foundational Components of literacy development:

1. Vocabulary
2. Fluency
3. Comprehension of narrative and expository text
4. Writing
 COMPONENTS OF LITERACY
DEVELOPMENT
Foundational Components of literacy development:
1. Vocabulary
1. Developing students’ academic vocabulary = teaching content knowledge
2. Words and concepts enjoy a close relationship

2. Fluency
1. Proficient readers = fluent readers
2. Reading with accuracy and speed, adjusting their reading rate when it is needed;
their expressive reading and phrasing sound like a natural conversation
3. Comprehension of narrative and expository text
1. Wide range of texts
2. Informational books – textbooks, scientific texts, primary source materials, other
related informational literature
4. Writing
1. Means of communication; reveals writers’ knowledge about a specific topic
 COMPONENTS OF LITERACY
DEVELOPMENT

Three areas that affect literacy development and learning in the

content areas:
1. Media and digital literacies
2. Critical thinking skills
3. Independent or self-regulated learning
Thank you for listening
literate thinkers.