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Importance of literacy instruction
Importance of literacy instruction
Importance of literacy instruction
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“Phenomenologically, Donny and Timmy were not growing up in a literate environment. Although they lived in a home situation in a city situated in a country that contained many forms and functions for print, they did not experience it. They did not notice it around them; they did not understand its uses. Their world functioned without written language” (Purcell-Gates, 1997, p. 58).
Donny attended Head Start for one year then went to first grade. At that time, kindergarten was not required. It would probably have been beneficial for Danny to attend kindergarten, but, since his parents couldn’t read and nobody told him about it they had no clue. It’s obvious that the importance of early intervention wasn’t recognized as much in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. As of 2014, only 16 states required kindergarten attendance (U.S. Department of Education, 2014).
For a literate family, literacy begins in the home when parents read to their child and have books in the home. Reading aloud to children is a very important part of early literacy because it “encourages children to form a positive association with books and reading later in life” (Reach Out and Read, 2015). Both of Jenny’s parents could
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It is hard to believe that somewhere, just from exposure, she would have learned something. But, I think for a lot of people in poverty, they are mostly concerned with living and their basic needs. Unfortunately, reading isn’t one of them. “Illiteracy has become such a serious problem in our country that 44 million adults are now unable to read a simple story to their children” (The Literacy Project). When I was growing up, my parents were avid readers, thus I became one too. However, my twelve year old daughter is not. She has never read a book for pleasure and finds reading boring. It’s hard for me to fathom someone not having the desire to
Deborah Brandt (1998) wrote “Sponsors of Literacy”, a journal where she explained her findings of the research she has done on how different people across the nation learned to read and write, born between 1900, and 1980 (p. 167). She interviewed many people that had varying forms of their literacy skills, whether it was from being poor, being rich, or just being in the wrong spot at the wrong time.
Other People’s Words: The Cycle of Low Literacy by Victoria Purcell-Gates recounts the author’s two-year journey with an illiterate Appalachian family. Purcell-Gates works with Jenny, the mother, and her son, first grader Donny, to analyze the literacy within the household. Throughout the journey, we learn the definition and types of literacy, the influences of society and the environment, and the impacts of literacy on education from the teacher’s perspective. In order to evaluate literacy in the household, one must study multiple types, including functional, informational, and critical literacy. As the name implies, functional literacy incorporates reading and writing as tools for everyday survival. Informational literacy is used through text to communicate information to others. The highest level of literacy, critical literacy, requires critical interpretations and imaginative reflections of text. In her study, Purcell-Gates strives to teach Jenny and Donny functional literacy.
Struggling with reading came early on in Mikayla’s academic years. Her family was definitely an early influence in her reading ability. Her parents and grandparents were very involved in Mikayla’s reading development. Her father on his off nights would read bedtime stories to her and her sister until about third grade. After third grade, she was expected to read at least thirty minutes before bed every night. She also joined in on Grandpa’s morning rituals of reading the paper, she would read the funnies. According to Jongsu Wee, we learn our reading habits because it is embedded in our everyday life (Jongsu, 2009). Pamela, Mikayla’s mother, said that often Mikayla was very talkative about the books her parents would read to her. She was so excited about reading the next one that often times her mother would stop in the middle of reading to leave her in suspense. Her grandfather, Carl, was also a great influence in her reading. When she would stay at her grandparents’ house, Carl would often read her the funnies or a story in...
The purpose of this study is to figure out which ways experienced teachers work best with culturally and linguistically diverse students. This study illustrates which strategies experienced teachers have found to work best. The diversity in school in the United States has increased each year. This means that there are an increasing amount of students who are learning English, English language learners (ELLs). This article comes from the perspective that each child should be taught to their specific needs. All students deserve a fair chance to learn. Fair means that every student is treated differently, not equally. Every student learns differently. In order to give every student a fair chance at learning, you must teach them according to their needs. An experienced teacher, Tiffany, describes her experiences working with culturally and linguistically diverse students. This study watches her methods and discusses what works based on data analysis of the success of her students.
Support from parents has proven to be of extreme importance in the literacy success of a child. This often begins with the simple ritual of “bedtime stories” in the home. Studies show that children who are read to as infants perform better in literacy later in life. From a young age, children begin to understand the workings of the written word if they are exposed to it frequently. Babies who are nowhere near having the mental capacity to read and comprehend a book are still able to “follow along” when their parents or caregivers read to them. These children understand that each segment of writing represents a word and they are even able to recognize when a text is upside-down because they are accustomed to the appearance of writing. This puts the child significantly ahead when the time comes to learn to read.
Living in the Southern United States during eighteenth century was a difficult time for African-Americans. Majority of them were slaves who received manipulation, sexual abuse and brutally whips to the spin. They were treated this way in order to stop them from gaining hope, knowledge and understanding of the world. Some African Americans managed to obtain these qualities from books and use them to escape from slavery. Frederick Douglass, an abolitionist who wrote an autobiography, from which the excerpt "Learning to Read and Write" explains how he developed literacy. In the excerpt, an African American slave banned from learning to read and write, breaks the law in an attempt to free his mind from the restricted beliefs of his master. One significant idea portrayed from Douglass's ordeal is that reading and writing is a vital skill that benefits humanity.
Finding a definition of literacy is not as easy as it sounds. The Webster definition says that to be literate is to be” able to read and write.” But to some researchers, this definition is too simplistic, leading to multiple models of literacy. Most Americans adhere to the autonomous model, which falls closest to the standard, dictionary definition. Believers in this form say that literacy is a cognitive activity that students learn like any other basic skill. It has a set of proficiencies that one must master in order to be capable of decoding and encoding text (Alvermann, 2009; SIL International, 1999). A competing theory is the ideological model, which claims literacy is intrinsically linked to culture, and therefore what constitutes a “literate” individual is ever-changing. Society is the largest influence on literacy, according to this thought, and it is affected by politics, religion, philosophy and more (Alvermann, 2009; SIL International, 1999). These two are just the tip of the iceberg. For example, some studies recognize “literacy as competence,” which is a “measure of competence to do a given task or work in a given field,” (SIL International, 1999) such as being computer literate. Although more researchers are recognizing and exploring multiple literacies, the one that most influences American schools is the autonomous, cognitive model – the ability to read and write. For many, it seems a simple task, but millions of adolescents are struggling or reluctant readers, and there are many reasons why young readers have difficulty with reading. XXXXXX------NEED HELP WITH THESIS STATEMENT HERE PLEASE—(This paper will focus on the effects of low reading skills, some of the possible causes of reluctant and struggling readership...
Growing up in working class family, my mom worked all the time for the living of a big family with five kids, and my dad was in re-education camp because of his association with U.S. government before 1975. My grandma was my primary guardian. “Go to study, go to read your books, read anything you like to read if you want to have a better life,” my grandma kept bouncing that phrase in my childhood. It becomes the sole rule for me to have better future. I become curious and wonder what the inside of reading and write can make my life difference. In my old days, there was no computer, no laptop, no phone…etc, to play or to spend time with, other than books. I had no other choice than read, and read and tended to dig deep in science books, math books, and chemistry books. I tended to interest in how the problem was solved. I even used my saving money to buy my own math books to read more problems and how to solve the problem. I remembered that I ended up reading the same math book as my seventh grade teacher. She used to throw the challenge questions on every quiz to pick out the brighter student. There was few students know how to solve those challenge questions. I was the one who fortunately nailed it every single time. My passion and my logic for reading and writing came to me through that experience, and also through my grandma and my mom who plant the seed in me, who want their kids to have happy and better life than they were. In my own dictionary, literacy is not just the ability to read and write, it is a strong foundation to build up the knowledge to have better life, to become who I am today.
Literacy is most commonly understood as reading and writing. But before children can read and write, they need to learn about sound, words, language, books and stories (Raising Children, 2015). Children begin to develop and gain knowledge quite differently and with support and developmentally appropriate learning skills children will also come to understand the connection between letters and sounds. Literacy development or early literacy is the most essential in the first three years of life as it the earliest experience children have with language, sound and the positive interactions between child and adult. Vygotsky (1978) believed in how children developed, and the important role of adults in leading child’s early development. The interactions
Literacy learning that occurs in the early years before age eight, helps prepare the child for school and life success and produces long term developments. The amount of language a child hears in their first years of life contributes to their cognitive development and human interactions that include language form the foundation for their ability of reading comprehension later in life. “Vocabulary development at age three has been found to predict reading achievement by third grade” (Lesaux, 2013). Later in the literacy learning process, when the child begins to read, they begin to learn new words beyond the familiar words they hear their family use in their daily life. They begin by being read to out loud from their parents.
My Literacy Experience Everyone’s first experience with literature goes all the way back to elementary school. In order to do anything successfully, a person must first master the basics. Reading and writing require that you first learn the alphabet, how to pronounce letters, and how to put those letters together to form words. As a child I struggled with these basics, and so that discouraged me to the point of where I did not even want to try. If it was not for my grandmother, parents, and the realization that not being able to read will lead to failure, I would not enjoy literature as much as I do today.
If parents lack in language or vocabulary knowledge and do not have the proper resources, tools or income to invest in books, learning toys, or activities, the children are at risk in having a literacy gap. As reported by Dr. Moats, "children from advantaged homes may know as many as 15,000 more words than children from less advantaged homes"(Kaefer, Neuman, and Pinkham 203). Because low socio-economic parents are unlikely to read books to their children, it spawns a literacy gap prior to the children entering school. According to an Australian Institute of Family Study, "sixty-two percent of children with a parent with tertiary education were read to every day, compared with twenty-eight percent of children whose parents had not completed school" (Beaman, Buckingham, and Wheldall 432). This goes back to the cycle, perhaps the parents were not read to as children or wise enough to know they should read to their children; or even, some are required to work crazy or late hours to upkeep their
Literacy is critically important to student success in mathematics. According to researchers, “mathematics is the most difficult content area material to read because there are more concepts per word, per sentence, and per paragraph than any other subject” (as cited in Braselton and Decker, 1994). Monroe addressed the issue of literacy in mathematics as not being simply computational arithmetic, but rather mathematics as a way thinking and communicating to solve problems (1996). Active mathematical literacy has a strong connection to real life; it’s more than just memorizing the facts, it is math connected to real life with a meaning and a purpose (Monroe, 1996). “When mathematical concepts are segregated from the language contexts in which they naturally occur, learning disabilities are likely to result” (Monroe, 1996 p. 2). She further explained, when students talk about what they are learning they clarify their thinking and construct personal meaning for their learning. “The cognitive abilities to learn both [a] language and mathematics are developmentally acquired. Research evidence tells us that these abilities can be nurtured, but they
There are times, we have the tendency to make things more difficult than they need to be. This can be the case when it comes to teaching literacy development in children. In this case, "the alphabetic principle is the understanding that words consist of letters that correspond to sounds" (Coats, 2013). That's it. We need to figure out ways that allow children to best learn this. I like the approach of teaching children different words and then play off those words by changing the first letter(s) to make a rhyming word. When children see how easily this can be done, they will quickly begin to associate the sounds the letters make with their visual recognition of the letters.
English language is recognized as the lingua franca of the global economic frontier due to its “rapidly [increasing use in] globalizing business and professional worlds” (Evans, 2013). English literacy has shifted outside native English-speaking borders and spread to EFL (English as Foreign Language) regions, becoming a compulsory subject for students. Consequently, English is being widely used “for international … and … national communication” (Warschauer, 2000) where domestic and international companies wont English as their main medium of instruction in business communications. Having English literacy is now considered a basic requirement for employment. However, speakers of the English language differ from one another; each speaker has his or her unique accent when speaking English. An accent is a unique mode of sound production that is influenced by a speaker's dialect or native language (Edwards, 1997; Carlson and McHenry, 2006) and is divided into “standard or nonstandard” (Fishman, 1971). According to Ryan, Hewstone, and Giles (1984), standard – accent speakers are highly regarded for qualities related to “competence, intelligence, and social status”, while nonstandard – accent speakers are considered less satisfactory. Hence, nonstandard English speakers often face prejudice when seeking employment, being deemed unsuitable for certain jobs although no specific status is attributed to them (Carlson and McHenry, 2006). Much of