The Importance Of A Literate Classroom

Being literate sparks from the importance of immersing a child within a literate classroom. Goodwin (2011) states that ‘a literate classroom will be full of purposeful interaction between children and adults, where genuine conservations spark ideas and allow learners to work on understanding’ (p2). This indicates that a large contribution to the literate classroom is the ability for children to develop their speaking and listening with confidence. Goodwin develops the importance of a literate classroom in that, if children are confident and believe in themselves with regards to being readers and writers, then they shall read and write (p2, 2011).

A crucial part of English is speaking, listening, reading and writing as a collective. This forms the basis of English learning within and outside the classroom. Speaking is required for writing as ‘preparing to write by talking through ideas… help young writers to gather ideas before facing an empty page’ (2011, p3, Goodwin). Communicating with peers through speaking and listening can develop children’s ability to write, and through reading, children improve their imagination. Through modern technology children are now able to access English learning through personalised and adapted methods. Accessible technology such as ‘electronic texts can be programmed to adapt to an individual reader’s needs and interests during reading, which may in turn affect the strategies readers use to read and comprehend texts’ (2006, p108, Wray). This allows children to have a greater choice over the texts they choose to read and the interactivity between text and reader is increased. With information technology developing at its current rate, a large majority of children now have access to multimodal tech...

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...cus on the content of the resource rather than being worried about being told off for untidy handwriting, thus allowing them to be more creative and have more freedom in their writing. Allowing children to use the information they have learnt to go away and explore for themselves both individually and with peers is a crucial part of the English classroom. The ability to adapt this resource easily, if necessary, is supportive of the view that, ‘technology is inclusive, in that information can be presented in a variety of ways according to the size of the audience and the special needs of particular individuals’ (2013, p233, Waugh and Jolliffe). This resource can be adapted to both the teachers and the children’s requirements as it can be taught either as the lesson plans depict (See Appendix A, B, C and D for full lesson plans) or as the teacher sees appropriate.