Literacy in the lives of adolescents

By Hong Rao

Introduction of the interviewee

Age: 17 Gender : male Grade: 11 Family background: a middle class family

with his mother being a teacher and his father a businessman; only child of his family

Illness: OCD

Hobby: music and basketball

Academic level: low Literacy level:

intermediate Nationality: Chinese First language:

Chinese Foreign language:

English

The record of the interview Question 1: In what kinds of

literacy activities do you participate on a regular basis?

Read news Chat with friends Send short

messages Finish the

assignments by teachers

The record of the interview Question 2: What inspires or

motivates you to read and/ or write?

Have fun Prepare for tests Have a good

relationship with others

The record of the interview Question 3: What literacy

challenges do you face?

Read very slowly Have difficulty

understanding the writing tasks

Spend long time to organize the article

The record of the interview Question 4: What strategies do

you use to help overcome these challenges?

Read the key words Guess the meaning

of the difficult words

Write without specific plan

The record of the interview Question 5: What literacy tools

do you enjoy on a regular basis, and why?

Micro blog to share with others

interesting things Internet library to download electric

books and read conveniently

Wechat News with sound QQ, Facebook

The interviewee’s literacy development

Communicate with friends fluently

Read interesting stories or news online

Share his own stories or interesting things online

Have difficulty in reading academic articles and writing critically

Have difficulty in learning other subjects

Literacy skills that the interviewee possesses

Basic literacy skills A) pronounce

correctly B) spell the basic

words C) Write the correct

sentences with basic grammars

D) Read simple articles

Generic literacy skills A) Read the key words B) Guess the meaning

of the words according to the content

C) Write a passage including several paragraphs

Discipline literacy skills:

inadequate

Essential skills needed for the interviewee’s ongoing development

Basic literacy skills A) More difficult

vocabularies Generic literacy

skills A) complex

sentence patterns B) Structure of a

writing passage

C) scanning and skimming the text

Discipline literacy skills A) specific writing style

of subjects B) specific vocabularies

of subjects C) understand the basic

concepts of subjects

Literacy instructions to motivate the interviewee

Share his online readings and findings with others in public or through Wechat, microblog or other social network

Inform him some websites with more difficult and relevant articles and let him read and share

Make a plan for learning vocabularies, encouraging him to write something with the new words to share with others

Model him the writing styles and make him practise

Instruct him to scan and read in limited time

Insights from the learning materials Students face increasingly challenging

text as they progress through grade, the length of the text , the words and sentences are becoming longer and more complex. The need to synthesize information through across multiple texts and formats increase sharply—(Biancarosa, G., 2012). So we should instruct students to deal with complex text.

Insights from the learning materials Digital reading can increase the

amount of reading materials that are available to adolescents and heightened the need for critical thinking (Biancarosa, G., 2012).

Insights from the learning materials Everybody sees written-down things

in different ways depending on our own life experiences, and we can learn from each other. Treat our responses as important , whether or not we like something to agree with the experts (Cushman, 2003).

References Biancarosa, G. (2012). Adolescent

literacy: More than remediation. Educational Leadership, 69(6), 22–27.

Cushman, K. (2003). Fires in the bathroom: Advice for teachers from high school students. New York: New Press.