Academic Literacy and New Literacy Studies
How can we assess academic literacy?
Since this is such a new area it is difficult to find valid/reliable assessments. But there are some informal assessments that help teachers survey what students know about topics and the kinds of materials they are familiar with using for their research. These are : research logs, self-rating scales, prereading plans (PreP), and semantic maps.
Why are these literacies important?
What is academic literacy?
A third component of
literacy is that of new literacy studies.
Another component of academic literacy is that of research/study skills.
They are important because the more specialized the academic disciplines become the more specialized are the ways with vocabularies, concepts and knowledges, and the accepted and valued patterns of meaning-making activities such as genres, rhetorical structures, argument formulations and narrative devices.
Academic literacy is also known as content-area reading; and it has to do with applying literacy skills and strategies to acquire content knowledge in core subject areas-mathematics, science, and social studies, etc.
New literacy skills is a fairly new area of literacy and is in a constant state of flux. It has been defined as "the skills, strategies, and insights necessare to successfully exploit the rapidly changing information and communication technologies that continuously emerge in our world" (as cited by Leu, 2002, p.310).
Teaching Academic Literacy Skills
Research and study skills are crucial for helping students achieve academic literacy. Research and reference skills include: note taking; mapping known and unknown information areas; choosing sources for obtaining information such as the internet, interviews, and reference materials.
It is imperative then that we teach students how to become effective researchers of knowledge. Susan De la Paz is credited with developing an effective process for teaching students the kinds of research and reference skills they will need later in their academic careers.
SAMPLES:
Other literacy enhancing strategies are as follows:
But how can you accomplish this effectively?
- The following list summarizes the recommendations by De la Paz:
Let's see if we can make this a little easier– when you read you begin with ABC and when you summarize/retell you can use the Written Academic Learning Summary (WALS):
The purpose for research by students is to gain and understand new knowledge about a topic. One proven strategy for collecting new information, understanding it, and assimilating it into their prior knowledge for later recall is the use of graphic organizers.
The flow chart looks something like this–
- Classroom blogging allows for students and teachers to create web personal web pages of text, pictures, graphics, videos with the same ease as using a word processor.
- Electronic Talking Books (e-books) are great for beginning/struggling readers because of the hypertext features such as spoken narration, music, video, or highlighting of words/sentences with spoken explanations.
- e-reading and e-responding allows students to read and write electronic journal responses on a computer.
- Wiki Writing allows students to collaboratively produce/co-author documents and contains links to other parts of the document on the Internet.
Academic Word Wall (AW)––Graphic Organizer (GO)––Developing Written Paragraph––Completed Summary
- describe the strategy depicting the necessary steps and the when and the when and why to use it
- activate prior knowledge through thorough reviews
- review students' current level of performance
- model, model, and model the strategy some more
- provide for collaborative practice
- include time for independent practice
- generalize the strategy or use it routinely in future teaching