Adolescent Literacy:What are the Challenges?

Aaron Wilson & Denise HitchcockSLP HuiDec 3, 2008

Focus of this project

• Academic literacy• Reading and Writing• Content-area discourse • Literacy in the mainstream

classroom• Developing student independence

Why focus on literacy?• Adolescents entering the adult world in the 21st

century will read and write more than at any other time in human history. They will need advanced levels of literacy to perform their jobs, run their households, act as citizens, and conduct their personal lives. They will need literacy to cope with the flood of information they will find everywhere they turn. They will need literacy to feed their imaginations so they can create the world of the future. In a complex and sometimes even dangerous world, their ability to read will be crucial.

(Moore et al. 1999, p.99)

Who will be “safe” from outsourcing, digitalisation and

automatisation?• The great versatilists

– Specialists generally have deep skills and narrow scope, giving them expertise that is recognised by peers but not valued outside their domain

– Generalists have broad scope but shallow skills– Versatilists apply depth of skill to a progressively

widening scope of situations and experiences, gaining new competencies, building relationships, and assuming new roles.

• The great personalisers– A revival of interpersonal skills, skills that have atrophied

to some degree because of the industrial age and the Internet

• The great localisers– Localising the global

• The great collaborators and orchestrators– The more complex the globalised world becomes,

the more individuals and companies need various forms of co-ordination and management

• The great synthesisers– Conventionally, our approach to problems was

breaking them down into manageable bits and pieces, today we create value by synthesising disparate bits together

• The great explainers– The more content we can search and access, the

more important those become who can transcend disciplinary boundaries

(Andreas.Schleicher@OECD.org)

Features of adolescent literacy

• Reading and writing demands are fundamentally different from those placed on students in primary schools

• Texts increase in sophistication• Reading and writing demands in content

areas become increasingly specialised• ‘Generalised’ literacy does not

necessarily translate into content area/disciplinary literacy

(McDonald & Thornley 2005,T. & C. Shanahan 2008)

What is ‘text’ in a secondary context?

In content learning areas students need to be able to read texts such as:

• information from subject textbooks• graphs, diagrams or tables• web pages• assessment tasks• extended texts• word problems in mathematics• sets of instructions

Secondary text

These texts often feature:• multiple pieces of information in the context of

longer texts• complex themes, plots, settings and

relationships• non-sequential organisation including complex

graphics and sections that are not clearly linked

• concepts and information written for a general adult audience

Secondary schools require students to:

• Independently read large amounts of text

• Learn and use specialised and technical vocabulary

• Master knowledge of a wide range of text structures

• Make meaning from a range of texts

NCEA exam reports say that students need to:

• Read the question carefully and identify key words in the question (all subjects)

• Identify viewpoints relating to geographic ideas and issues (Geography)

• Provide factual details and / or paraphrased quotations from primary and secondary sources (Classical Studies)

• Understand and use appropriate language to describe elements and structural devices (Music)

• Engage with insight into the texts and concepts studied (Media Studies)

• Read diagrams - e.g. Hertzsprung-Russell (Science)

NCEA exam reports continued

• Incorporate resource material and data into answers (Economics) • Identify physics concepts, phenomena and principles in the

context of the question (Physics)• Read correctly off a graph( Mathematics)• Identify features of packaging that encourages people to buy the

product (Home Economics)• Research documents and analyse relevant methods and ideas

relating to art, and apply them (Visual Arts) • Describe by using information from a diagram – role of legumes

in nitrogen cycle (Chemistry)

(Cheryl Harvey & Jennifer Glenn, 2007)

Content-area literacy demandsDiscipline practicesexamples

Vocab. / strategiesexamples

History Attention to author and source, authorial perspective and judging credibility; document analysis so bias monitoring (treatment of ‘facts’)

Difficulty of general (non technical) words high (eg ‘aggressive’, adversarial’ ‘Black Thursday’); thinking about connections will apply (intertextual/ coherence) but subject specific

Chemistry Transformation of information (eg graph to page to graph); knowledge through quality of instruments, methods given this trust in utility and generalisablity of knowledge

General and specific words; nominalisation of words (verb to noun…dissolution); structured note taking / summarization can apply but within discipline

Maths Precision of reading, close reading; proofs must be error free. Monitoring proofs

Each word vital (‘the’ vs ‘a’) rereading and close reading. Technical words need to be learned (memorised / automatic) eg ‘prime’); BUT letters and symbols both specific and variable; main ideas and abstracting does apply but in discipline formats

Common teacher responses • Leaving it to the English department

• Minimising opportunities for students to read independently• Simplifying the texts that students read and write• Summarising the text for students e.g. providing notes to copy• Focus on (receptive) vocabulary only• Scaffolding ‘in’ but not scaffolding ‘out’• Providing support - but not developing independence• Providing isolated activities without a clear purpose and without

reference to evidence of need• Remedial withdrawal programmes that do not focus on content-

area literacy demands• Not evaluating the impact of literacy activities on literacy learning

Student voice•Students felt that they didn’t read enough, that they had

too few opportunities to read independently, did not get taught how to deal with different text forms or with extended texts;

•Too few teachers really explained how things worked as they do or why they should undertake activities in specific ways. One comment suggested that some teachers “tell you what to do and then tell you the answer if you don’t get it.” Students said that this approach didn’t help;

Student Voice continued

• Students were clear that some of their peers needed different levels of support, perhaps slightly different work or expectations and that it was important for teachers to be realistic, to change the ways in which they did some things depending on the student;

• Students had noted that there was an increasing emphasis on research at secondary school and that they needed help in learning about the research process from identifying research questions to gathering information and to preparing reports.

(McDonald & Thornley, 2005)

Implications for teaching and learning

Teachers need to be supported and challenged to:• become more aware of the literacy challenges

inherent in their content area; • develop a detailed understanding of the literacy

skills and needs of their students in relation to these challenges;

• learn how to equip students with the independent skills needed to meet these challenges.

‘Strategies’

• Are what students do independently in their heads to solve problems they encounter in reading and writing

Challenge and support

Weak support

Strong support

Lowchallenge

Highchallenge

Strong performance

Systemic improvement

Poor performance

Improvements idiosyncratic

Conflict

Demoralisation

Poor performance

Stagnation

Literacy Learning Progressions

• ‘Actual and Aspirational’ BUT a pretty good indicator of what students need to be able to do for them to be on track to achieving much beyond Achievement at Level One, NCEA.

Some Characteristics of Quality Language Learning

English language learners learn best when:

• They are provided with meaningful, high challenge/high support tasks;

• Language learning is amplified rather than simplified;

• They are engaged in long term projects that help them connect their funds of knowledge with newly acquired concepts and language over time.

• Based on Walqui 2003

Ethnic and Language Diversity

• 22.9% of people in NZ were born overseas

• 29,096 students in NZ are ‘ESOL funded’ representing :- 164 different ethnic groups - 163 different countries - 109 different languages

ESOL in NZ

• 13 schools with 200+ ESOL funded students

• 40 schools with 100-200• 119 schools have 50-100 students• The 29,096 ESOL funded students

represent just 22% of the estimated 133,000 students from language backgrounds other than English.

Recommended Reading:

– McDonald,T. & Thornley, C., (2005). Literacy teaching and learning during the secondary years:Establishing a pathway for success to NCEA and beyond. Set:Research information for teachers 2:9-14

– McDonald,T. & Thornley, C.,(2006). Adolescent Literacy: A Review of Recent Literature. Dunedin: Education Associates

– Shanahan, T. & Shanahan, C, (2007). Teaching disciplinary literacy to adolescents: rethinking content-area literacy. Harvard Educational Review, 78,(1) 40-59.