Literacy is a skill, plain and simple.
And like any skill, it must be practiced and sharpened.
From what I have mentioned above then hopefully we can assume that every content in high school has a literacy that they are trying to teach to their students. In English, I believe that we tend to focus on various amount of literacies: writing literacy, reading literacy, digital literacy, oral literacy, etc.
When reading, we want our students to be able to comprehend the text as well as critically reading it. We can do a couple of things to assist our students' development of reading literacy. For instance, when you are beginning a difficult text, model for the students your thinking process, especially when coming across a word that you don't know the definition. This is an opportune time to show students how to use context clues. To frontload a text, do a vocabulary lesson where you expose the students to vocabulary that they will encounter in the reading. This will prepare them for the language that they will encounter in their reading as well as expand their personal vocabulary.
Digital literacy surprised me the most in this class. Of course I had been exposed to using digital literacies in a classroom before but not in this context. I wasn't aware of the simple activities we could do in a classroom that would promote looking at digital texts critically. For example, one activity that I would use in my class was when we looked at a list of Google's top ten results and we had to sort them and infer the reliability of the site based on the title and URL. This activity would be extremely useful when beginning a research paper.
Besides exposing me to the different literacies, this class has also given us many opportunities to discover our teaching style or beliefs about various aspects. For example, the idea either allowing or not allowing ELLs to use their home language in the classroom. Although I am of the opinion that, right now, English is the dominant professional language. If one wants to get a job, graduate school, or go college, they need a foundation of English. However, I feel that ELLs can use their home language to learn the content or gain a better understanding of the content. I had the opportunity to work at the English Language Center and so many time did students talk to each other in their home language to explain a concept or explain what the words were that we were teaching them.
In the end what does this all mean? Why did we spend fifteen weeks identifying different literacies? Because we use them all the time. There are some literacies that our students can develop on their own or at home, such as reading body language. However, critical literacy skills are one of the skills that we learned with support from our teachers and having the safety of a classroom for trial and error. Providing this environment as well as skills are key for being a successful educator.
