C&Pa Learning Focused Culture: Literacy 2

In this module, literacy will be introduced in ways in which our ākonga can make connections with print through oral language, reading, and writing.  

We do not want to know what tamariki don’t know; we want to know what they do know. 

Once we identify what tamariki know, what their interests, capabilities, and strengths are, we have a platform to launch learning and teaching.

Importantly, recognising the diversity of our ākonga, which includes the wealth of knowledge that already exists for them and their whānau, their Kaupapa, values, beliefs, culture, and identity.  

Nussbaum (2011) asserts that a person has internal capabilities, encompassing an individual’s characteristics and combined capabilities. Internal capabilities include personality traits, intellectual capacity, state of health, the ability to internalise learning, perception, and movement.

ATRiUM capabilities model that ensures we look at tamariki through the lens of culture, physical, cognitive, interpersonal, and intrapersonal skills and strengths.

As adults, we tend to think we have been able to read and write forever, and very few of us can recall how we learned to read and write. To be effective Kaiako of literacy, we must understand how children go through to become fluent readers who have effective comprehension skills and the skills required to be capable and articulate writers. 

Building the Foundations

The experiences our tamariki bring to school with them are the first foundations for being ‘joyfully literate’ (Loane, 2019).

McNaughton (2020) discusses the values and identities inherent in different literacy practices. Recognising that other people value different forms of literacy use is a valuable insight for Kaiako to have. If we were to think that only storybook reading was valuable, then we would be disregarding the importance of other texts such as non-fiction, the Bible, or the Koran for some children and their families. Similarly, if we ask children to write only narrative fiction texts at school, then we are disregarding all the oral, historical, and traditional stories that tamariki hear in their homes. Literacy expresses values and identity as well as fulfilling practical functions in our modern, global, society.

The Balanced Approach

Literacy, in this course, advocates using a balanced approach.  It has been borne out of what is known in academic circles as the ‘reading wars’.  On one side of the battleground is ‘the whole language’ approach which subscribes to tamariki gaining literacy from exposure and engagement in print-rich environments.  Tamariki learn to read by gaining meaning through oral language, phrasing, context cues, and practise.  On the other side of the battleground is the ‘code-orientated or structured’ approach to gaining literacy.  This relies on the explicit teaching of phonological awareness – we will learn more about this during our modules.  Straddling the literacy battleground is the balanced approach which maintains that the combination of explicit teaching in phonological awareness as well as drawing on the many concepts about print  allows for all tamariki to engage with both reading and writing in purposeful and meaningful ways. 

The five pillars from Tompkins et al.:

• Emergent literacy
• Word study
• Vocabulary
• Fluency
• Comprehension

Pathways to Literacy

Developmental Progression

The developmental progression of reading and writing is critical to the understanding of what children currently know and what they need to learn next. The Literacy Learning Progressions (LLP) are based on developmental progressions and provide important indicators for each stage of reading and writing.

…focus on what the current capabilities are and what the next steps look like…

The First Steps series offer a useful outline of the progressions tamariki progress through to gain literacy capabilities.  Unsurprising a key aspect of this is the relevance of the context to our tamariki – “The ultimate goal is for students to use writing in real-life settings to communicate their ideas, share information, raise awareness, stimulate thinking, and influence and change social issues that concern them” (Dept. Ed. WA, 2013, p. 38).

1. Read and examine First Steps Developmental Stages

2. Read Stahl, Flanigan, and McKenna Stage Models (pp. 3-8). Draw on table 1.2 and make connections across the LLP, First Steps, and Stahl et al. (2020).

The Cognitive Model

Reading and writing is a reciprocal process.  Cognitively speaking, reading is about decoding and writing is about encoding. Understanding the correlation between print and sound is an essential aspect of both processes. While some children seem to unlock the ‘code’ for themselves, others need explicit, systematic instruction in order to make progress. The Cognitive Model (Figure 1) (Stahl et al., 2020) is a useful illustration of what is required in order to become an effective reader – and writer.  Over this year we will dive deeper into each component of this model, it is another tool in us ensuring we take a balanced approach to reading and writing.  

 Phonological Awareness

Alongside the need for ākonga to gain understanding concepts about print, phonological awareness forms the foundations for gaining literacy – you can see this illustrated in the Cognitive Model.  Put simply, phonological awareness is having the ability to identify and manipulate the sounds (phonemes), syllables, onsets, and rimes in words.  It is the ability to identify the /c/ in cat and the /at/ in cat; to recognise that handle has two syllables han/dle. 

Phonemic awareness sits within phonological awareness and you will recognise this ability with young tamariki who you hear rhyming words (cat, mat, smat), orally manipulating, and blending sounds.  An important distinction to make is “the emphasis in the development of phonemic awareness is on the sounds of spoken words, not on reading letters or pronouncing letter names” (Tompkins et al. 2019, p. 146).  Phonics is simply the relationship between the letter (grapheme) and the sound (phoneme) – /a/ says ‘a’. I often illustrate this as an umbrella – phonological awareness is the over-riding concept, phonemic awareness sits underneath and the phonics is our handle. 

Mentor Texts – A Pedagogical Approach to Writing

…the job of the mentor text (pedagogical approach) [is to] models text forms and associated purposes. It provides the reader with an opportunity to deepen understandings and the writer with the opportunity to find and express their own voice in powerful new ways. Let’s try this out for ourselves:

A. Launch the lesson

• Think about theme
• Makes some notes of keywords, images, feelings.
• Recall your senses around the memory
• Write it down
• What would it be like if you could bring those experiences to mind freshened by increased significance? What if you could find ways of writing them down that invested them with sharper focus, maybe more impact for you and your audience?

B. Engage with (deconstruct) the model

• Read and notice the effect the [text] has on you 
• What language features caused this effect for you?
• Quote the word(s) and give the line they are in
• What could we call these things you have written down?

C. Create your own version (reconstruct) based on the model

1. Now try constructing your own 
2. Success criteria:
   • Uses similar imagery
   • uses similar format
   • Uses some of the things you noticed about the language and sentence structures for effect
3. Seek feedback
4. Edit