Adolescent Literacy

Common Myths about Adolescent Literacy 

 

1.      Myth: Literacy refers only to reading.

Reality: Literacy encompasses reading, writing, and a variety of social and intellectual practices that call upon the voice as well as the eye and hand. It also extends to new media—including non-digitized multimedia, digitized multimedia, and hypertext or hypermedia.

2.      Myth: Students learn everything about reading and writing in elementary school.

Reality: Some people see the processes of learning to read and write as similar to learning to ride a bicycle, as a set of skills that do not need further development once they have been achieved. Actually literacy learning is an ongoing and non-hierarchical process. Unlike math where one principle builds on another, literacy learning is recursive and requires continuing development and practice.

 

3.      Myth: Literacy instruction is the responsibility of English teachers alone.

Reality: Each academic content area poses its own literacy challenges in terms of vocabulary, concepts, and topics. Accordingly, adolescents in secondary school classes need

explicit instruction in the literacies of each discipline as well as the actual content of the course so that they can become successful readers and writers in all subject areas.

 

4.      Myth: Academics are all that matter in literacy learning.

Reality: Research shows that out-of-school literacies play a very important role in literacy learning, and teachers can draw on these skills to foster learning in school. Adolescents rely on literacy in their identity development, using reading and writing to defi ne themselves as persons. The discourses of specific disciplines and social/cultural contexts created by school classrooms shape the literacy learning of adolescents, especially when these discourses are different and conflicting.

 

5.      Myth: Students who struggle with one literacy will have diffi culty with all literacies.

Reality: Even casual observation shows that students who struggle with reading a physics text may be excellent readers of poetry; the student who has diffi culty with word problems in math may be very comfortable with historical narratives. More important, many of the literacies of adolescents are largely invisible in the classroom. Research on reading and writing beyond the classroom shows that students often have literacy skills that are not made evident in the classroom unless teachers make special efforts to include them.

 

6.      Myth: School writing is essentially an assessment tool that enables students to show what they have learned.

Reality: While it is true that writing is often central to assessment of what students have learned in school, it is also a means by which students learn and develop. Research shows that informal writing to learn can help increase student learning of content material, and it can even improve the summative writing in which students show what they have learned.

 

Understanding Adolescent Literacy

 

Overview: Dimensions of Adolescent Literacy

In adolescence, students simultaneously begin to develop important literacy resources and experience unique literacy challenges. By fourth grade many students have learned a number of the basic processes of reading and writing; however, they still need to master literacy practices unique to different levels, disciplines, texts, and situations. As adolescents experience the shift to content-area learning, they need help from teachers to develop the confi dence and skills necessary for specialized academic literacies.

Adolescents also begin to develop new literacy resources and participate in multiple discourse communities in and out of school. Frequently students’ extracurricular literacy proficiencies are not valued in school. Literacy’s link to community and identity means that it can be a site of resistance for adolescents. When students are not recognized for bringing valuable, multiple-literacy practices to school, they can become resistant to school-based literacy.

 

1) Shifting Literacy Demands

The move from elementary to secondary school entails many changes including fundamental ones in the nature of literacy requirements. For adolescents, schoolbased literacy shifts as students engage with disciplinary content and a wide variety of diffi cult texts and writing tasks. Elementary school usually prepares students in the processes of reading, but many adolescents do not understand the multiple dimensions of content-based literacies. Adolescents may struggle with reading in some areas and do quite well with others. They may also be challenged to write in ways that conform to new disciplinary discourses. The proliferation of high-stakes tests can complicate the literacy learning of adolescents, particularly if test preparation takes priority over content-specifi c literacy instruction across the disciplines.

 

2) Multiple and Social Literacies

Adolescent literacy is social, drawing from various discourse communities in and out of school. Adolescents already have access to many different discourses including those of ethnic, online, and popular culture communities. They regularly use literacies for social and political purposes as they create meanings and participate in shaping their immediate environments.

Teachers often devalue, ignore or censor adolescents’ extracurricular literacies, assuming that these literacies are morally suspect, raise controversial issues, or distract adolescents from more important work. This means that some adolescents’ literacy abilities remain largely invisible in the classroom.

 

3) Importance of Motivation

Motivation can determine whether adolescents engage with or disengage from literacy learning. If they are not engaged, adolescents with strong literacy skills may choose not to read or write. The number of students who are not engaged with or motivated by school learning grows at every grade level, reaching epidemic proportions in high school. At the secondary level, students need to build confi dence to meet new literacy challenges because confident readers are more likely to be engaged. Engagement is encouraged through meaningful connections.

A. Student Choice:

·         Self-selection and variety engage students by enabling ownership in literacy activities.

·         In adolescence, book selection options increase dramatically, and successful readers need to learn to choose texts they enjoy. If they can’t identify pleasurable books, adolescents often lose interest in reading.

·         Allowing student choice in writing tasks and genres can improve motivation. At the same time, writing choice must be balanced with a recognition that adolescents also need to learn the literacy practices that will support academic success.

·         Choice should be meaningful. Reading materials should be appropriate and should speak to adolescents’ diverse interests and varying abilities.

·         Student-chosen tasks must be supported with appropriate instructional support or scaffolding.

B. Responsive Classroom Environments:

·         Caring, responsive classroom environments enable students to take ownership of literacy activities and can counteract negative emotions that lead to lack of motivation.

·         Instruction should center around learners. Active, inquiry-based activities engage reluctant academic readers and writers. Inquiry based writing connects writing practices with real-world experiences and tasks.

·         Experiences with task-mastery enable increased selfeffi cacy, which leads to continued engagement.

·         Demystifying academic literacy helps adolescents stay engaged.

·         Using technology is one way to provide learner-centered, relevant activities. For example, many students who use computers to write show more engagement and motivation and produce longer and better papers.

·         Sustained experiences with diverse texts in a variety of genres that offer multiple perspectives on life experiences can enhance motivation, particularly if texts include electronic and visual media.

4) Value of Multicultural Perspectives

Monocultural approaches to teaching can cause or increase the achievement gap and adolescents’ disengagement with literacy. Students should see value in their own cultures and the cultures of others in their classrooms. Students who do not fi nd representations of their own cultures in texts are likely to lose interest in school-based literacies. Similarly, they should see their home languages as having value. Those whose home language is devalued in the classroom will usually fi nd school less engaging.

 

A. Multicultural Literacy across All Classrooms:

·         Multicultural education does not by itself foster cultural inclusiveness because it can sometimes reinforce stereotypical perceptions that need to be addressed critically.

·         Multicultural literacy is not just a way of reading “ethnic” texts or discussing issues of “diversity,” but rather is a holistic way of being that fosters social responsibility and extends well beyond English/language arts classrooms.

·         Teachers need to acknowledge that we all have cultural frameworks within which we operate, and everyone— teachers and students alike—needs to consider how these frameworks can be challenged or changed to benefi t all peoples.

·         Teacher knowledge of social science, pedagogical, and subject-matter content knowledge about diversity will foster adolescents’ learning.

·         Successful literacy development among English Language learners depends on and fosters collaborative multicultural relationships among researchers, teachers, parents, and students.

·         Integration of technology will enhance multicultural literacy.

·         Confronting issues of race and ethnicity within classrooms and in the larger community will enhance student learning and engagement.

B. Goals of Multicultural Literacy:

·         Students will view knowledge from diverse ethnic and cultural perspectives, and use knowledge to guide action that will create a humane and just world.

·         Teachers will help students understand the whiteness studies principle that white is a race so they can develop a critical perspective on racial thinking by people of all skin colors.

·         Multicultural literacy will serve as a means to move between cultures and communities and develop transnational understandings and collaboration.

·         Ideally, students will master basic literacies and become mulitculturally literate citizens who foster a democratic multicultural society.