Literacy Professional Learning Resource

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Literacy to Learn: Getting Students Knowledge Ready for Literacy Learning

Secondary teachers working in Northern Metropolitan region with Associate Professor John Munro have trialled and developed a series of literacy teaching procedures to support literacy learning in all learning domains. The procedures are referred to as ‘high reliability literacy teaching procedures’ or HRLTP’s and work by suggesting how readers can “act on” what they are reading in a number of systematic ways.

The procedures met a number of criteria they:

  • Enhance text comprehension
  • Can be included in the regular teaching program and be implemented on a whole class basis
  • Teach the learning outcomes that teachers were intending to achieve in each lesson
  • Lead to reading comprehension strategies that students could learn to use initially when directed and then independently and spontaneously as the need arose.

The following fifteen video excerpts videos depict teaching interactions to support students to get their knowledge of a topic ready for literacy activities and for learning.

Three aspects of getting students’ knowledge of a topic ready for learning:

  1. Stimulating students’ relevant experiential knowledge
  2. Getting students’ verbal knowledge ready for reading and learning and
  3. Guiding the students to align their existing knowledge with the text they will read.

Further information

 

Literacy to Learn videos

1. Getting students’ knowledge of a topic ready for learning

Literacy to learn - Getting students' knowledge

Getting students’ knowledge of a topic ready for learning to make texts easier to understand. There are different ways in which teachers can lead a group of students to do this including stimulating students’ relevant experiential knowledge by visualising what they know about a topic.

 

Literacy to learn - Getting students' knowledge

Stimulating students’ existing knowledge by organising and representing what students know about a topic to a verbal linguistic form.

 

Literacy to learn - Getting students' knowledge

 

Literacy to learn - Getting students' knowledge

 

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2. Getting students’ verbal knowledge ready for reading and learning

Literacy to learn - Getting students' verbal knowledge

Getting students’ verbal knowledge ready for reading and learning is the second aspect of getting students’ knowledge ready and refers to knowledge of:

  • Vocabulary
  • How ideas are organised
  • How ideas are expressed in language

There are various procedures teachers can use to do this, have students:

 

Literacy to learn - Paraphrasing sentences

Paraphrasing sentences taken from the text can also help students to link their existing knowledge with the text.

 

Literacy to learn - Supporting comprehension

Supporting comprehension

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3. Guiding the students to align their existing knowledge with the text they will read

Literacy to learn - Guiding the students to align their existing knowledge

Guiding the students to align their existing knowledge with the text they will read is a third aspect of getting student’s knowledge ready for learning and literacy about a topic.

 

4. Building students’ vocabulary knowledge to understand the text they are going to be reading

Literacy to learn - Building students' vocabulary knowledge

Building students’ vocabulary knowledge to understand the text they are going to be reading.

 

5. Scanning a text - students articulating what the scan action means

Literacy to learn - Scanning a text

Scanning a text - students articulating what the scan action means

 

6. Using key words in sentences and suggesting synonyms for the key words used

Literacy to learn - Scanning a text

 

 

7. Brainstorm and suggest words that might be mentioned in a text

Literacy to learn - Scanning a text

 

 

8. Spelling key words in a text

Literacy to learn - Scanning a text

 

 

9. Developing students’ meaning making motors

Literacy to learn - Developing students' meaning making motors

Guiding students to work out the actions that they used to work out the meanings of unfamiliar words as they read

 

10. Reviewing learning techniques

Literacy to learn - Reviewing learning techniques