A vision of literacy for adolescent learners in Ontario schools might be described as follows:

All students are equipped with the literacy skills necessary to be critical and creative thinkers, effective meaning makers and communicators, collaborative co-learners, and innovative problem solvers. These are the skills that will enable them to achieve personal, career, and societal goals.

Students, individually and in collaboration with others, develop skills in three areas, as follows:

• Thinking: Students access, manage, create, and evaluate information as they think imaginatively and critically in order to solve problems and make decisions, including those related to issues of fairness, equity, and social justice.

• Expression: Students use language and images in rich and varied forms as they read, write, listen, speak, view, represent, discuss, and think critically about ideas.

• Reflection: Students apply metacognitive knowledge and skills to monitor their own thinking and learning, and in the process, develop self-advocacy skills, a sense of self-efficacy, and an interest in lifelong learning.

As this vision for adolescent literacy suggests, literacy involves a range of critical-thinking skills and is essential for learning across the curriculum. Students need to learn to think, express, and reflect in discipline-specific ways. Teachers support them in this learning by not only addressing the curriculum expectations but also considering, and purposefully teaching students about, the literacy demands of the particular subject area. Literacy, inquiry skills, and numeracy are critical to students’ success in all subjects of the curriculum, and in all areas of their lives.

As stated earlier, oral communication skills are fundamental to the development of ESL literacy and are essential for thinking and learning. The expectations in all strands give students a chance to engage in brainstorming, reporting, and other oral activities to identify what they know about a topic, discuss strategies for solving a problem, present and defend ideas or debate issues, and offer critiques or feedback on work, skill demonstrations, or opinions expressed by their peers.

Activating prior knowledge and connecting learning to past experiences help students acquire literacy skills. Making connections to the literacy skills and strategies students already possess in their first language contributes to their literacy development in both languages. A focus on developing strategies that help students understand as well as talk and write about texts that are authentic, interesting, challenging, age appropriate, and linguistically accessible will increase student engagement, motivation, and success in ESL.

The Ministry of Education has facilitated the development of materials to support literacy instruction across the curriculum. Helpful advice for integrating literacy instruction in English as a Second Language courses may be found in the following resource documents:

If you are looking for resources that pertain specifically to English language learners (ELL), including helpful tools for STEP, useful links, and instructional ideas, please visit the Secondary ELL Toolkit.

https://sites.google.com/gotvdsb.ca/secondaryelltoolkit/home