MAINTAINING LITERACY STRATEGIES

Maintaining Literacy Strategies

Maintaining Literacy Strategies

Background and rationale

Literacy means the ability to read and write. Literacy underpins the school curriculum by developing pupils' ability to speak, listen, read and write for a range of purposes, in a variety of styles and for different audiences. They use language to learn and communicate, to think, to explore and organise. Literacy is one of the most important skills a person can have, it is central to learning and it is therefore essential that all staff, pupils and parents are aware of the Literacy Policies and promote these wherever possible to enable students to access the curriculum as fully as possible. Helping pupils to express themselves clearly both orally and in writing enhances and enriches teaching and learning in all subjects. (Department for Education and Employment 2000b: 13-25)

Competence and confidence in literacy, including capability in grammar, spelling and the spoken word, are essential for progress in all areas if the curriculum. All teachers have responsibility for promoting language and literacy development. Any whole school strategy for literacy should be essentially a non prescriptive guideline to implementing, maintaining and assessing literacy across the curriculum. It should take into consideration the nature of the school it is to be employed within as well as working in alliance with the values, ethos and working practices of each academic department. (Department for Education and Employment 2000a: 11-58)

Every teacher in each area of the curriculum needs to find opportunities to encourage young people to explain their thinking debate their ideas and read and write at a level which will help them to develop their language skills further to create a rich literate population. (Howe et al 2005:5)

The focus of secondary education has largely been on science as a practical subject, often quite rightly, for science is partly an empirical subject. But for many pupils the greatest obstacle in learning science - and also the most important achievement - is to learn its language. One of the important features of science is the richness of the words and terms it uses. Almost all teaching and learning take place using the medium if language, verbal and non-verbal. This involves some fairly complex processes and interactions, many if which depend on tacit ideas, implicit ground rules and traditional beliefs about what is expected in classrooms. Yet Wellington & Osborne (2001:5) concludes about science:

Learning the language of science is a major part (if not the major part) if science education. Every science lesson is a language lesson.

Language is a major barrier (if not the major barrier) to most pupils in learning science.

There are many practical strategies which can help to overcome these barriers.

Ofsted Reports and other important Organizations like DfES (2006:9) found that students who have Language (EAL) find great difficulty in trying to meet the challenges if the curriculum. One if the main reasons for this is an inconsistent teaching approach and not being able to link literacy strategies across subject ...