Monday, March 22, 2010

Adolescent Literacy: What Hot, What's Not

The March 2010 JAAL shares What's Hot and Not in Reading. This year: adolescent literacy, comprehension, literacy coaches, RtI, among others.

The article references CCAAL's Time to Act: which concludes "that adolescents need a higher level of literacy than ever before, both for college-readiness and employment in the new gloabal knowledge economy".

Also, Reading Next (2004) which says "very few of these older struggling readers need help to read the words on a page; their most common problem is that they are not able to comprehend what they read." The report idenitifes 15 elements of effective instruction: direct, explicit ecomprehension instruction, strategies instruction, comprehension monitoring, metacognitive instruction, teacher modeling, scaffolded instruction, apprenticeship models.

Motivation was a topic that should be hot, according to those who were surveyed. Taboada (2009) identifed 5 dimensions of reading: perceived control, interest, self-efficacy, involvement, and social collaboration.

Ending quote from Brozo: "To me it is at the heart of why programmatic initiatives are failing. They are decontextualized; meaningful learning is not taking place. Students today have so many options for gaining information other than print. We need to focus on ways to engage students with their texts."

No comments:

Post a Comment