8 Areas of Literacy Knowledge

1) Building relevant oral language to support literacy

These include:

• how word meanings are linked with synonyms and antonyms

• how ideas are linked into spoken sentences, sentence propositions, and grammatical knowledge (sentence level of text comprehension)

• how ideas are linked into themes (topic or theme level of text comprehension)

• how the social context affects how ideas are communicated, the attitudes and values of the writer towards the ideas in the text (the pragmatic or dispositional level of text comprehension)

• how experiential, imagery, action, and motor knowledge is mapped or converted into verbal-linguistic knowledge and vice versa.

2) Awareness that texts are written for a range of purposes

…that they are written from socio-cultural contexts, that they can be interpreted from multiple perspectives, and that readers can identify and infer the techniques used to influence or to persuade them to a particular interpretation, for example, use of language.

3) Word meaning and vocabulary knowledge

…and the capacity to learn word meanings of increasing complexity and building word meaning networks, organizing word meanings in increasingly complex ways.

4) Orthographic and morphemic knowledge

…and the ability to integrate these areas of knowledge into increasingly complex letter cluster knowledge that deliver effective word-level reading and spelling.

Linked with this is relevant phonological and phonemic knowledge.

5) Reading aloud to achieve fluency and phrasing

…with different kinds of texts.

6) Literal, critical, inferential, and creative comprehension outcomes

…to achieve these outcomes for the various types of texts they learn a range of comprehending sentences that they use with sentences, paragraphs, and whole texts.

These include:

• visualizing, paraphrasing, and contextualizing sentences and asking questions about them

• consolidating and summarizing what has been read; backtracking, reading ahead or within and across sentences to link concepts

• predicting, anticipating, inferring various types of ideas and feelings

• detecting the general theme by scanning or skimming the text, selecting keywords

• detecting attitudes and the disposition of the writer in a text.

 Students learn to integrate how they use these strategies. They apply them to an increasingly wide range of texts and use them selectively and in a sustained way, according to their purpose and goals at the time.

 7) Recognizing and using the forms, linguistic structures and features of written texts

8) The use of metacognitive and self-management strategies

…for various types of texts and in particular how students:

• frame-up reasons or purposes for reading a text, plan how they will read

• monitor their reading, initiate corrective action, decide when to re-read, self-correct, how they use what they know at each level, monitor how their reading is progressing, take remedial actions if necessary

• review and self-question to see whether reading goals achieved, review or consolidate what they have read

• organize the information gained from reading to fit their purposes for reading.

Associate Professor John Munro

As presented in Literacy Improvement: Operationalising and Contextualising a conceptual model (PDF – 84KB) (www.edfac.unimelb.edu.au/eldi/selage/documents/LLDR-Litimprovoperatio.pdf) at the conference of the international Congress of School Effectiveness and Improvement, January 2003.

www.education.vic.gov.au/studentlearning/teachingresources/english/