TeachingEnglish
Teaching Literacy Skills
Submitted by halasalih on 16 May, 2009 - 20:28
I was just wondering if teaching literacy skills helps English Language learners in acquiring a sense of the language?
- Login or register to post comments
Printer-friendly version
Log in or register
Follow TeachingEnglish
 |
 |
 |
 |
I always felt you learn and understand much better material that you teach even if you had already acquired the knowledge of the topic before.
Nancy Morino
Why Not
Certainly one can be a master by acquiring the right language literacy skills through different sources.
As we are in an advanced age, we do have the internet at hand that can be utilised in getting all the relevant material to learn.
And the more you learn, the more you polish your conversation skill.
Abdussami Bajwa
Without an iota of doubt, yes. Whenever I train students, I always tell them that we need to be students of the English Language throughout our life. The day we allow our ego to dominate our thinking process, our learning stops and ultimately we end up digging our own grave.
Do you mean that if you get students reading literary texts does their language improve? If this is what you mean, then I would say that definitely they do acquire a sense of language.
They do so more unconsciously than if they were in a traditional grammar course, but it takes some time to see results though and it take perseverance and calm to be able to read extensively - which is reading for pleasure.
Moreover, improvement can be seen in the four skills - reading, writing, listening and speaking; and in the vocabulary sub-skill.
I hope this input helped.
Francis
My understanding of literacy skills is learning to read and write including the countless sub-skills that these both can entail. For example the way we read a text is determined by the purpose of our reading and so there will be a need to scan: to get the general gist of it, skim: to locate a piece of information or read extensively. Similarly, writing involves skills at the text level( organization of information in paragraphs), sentence level( word order) and word level(spelling, punctuation etc).
Hope to get more ideas on this.
Hi
The question could be "What exactly is literacy?". We normally learn to be literate through exposure and practice. Any form of teaching it will still require practice within a particular genre. In fact, isn't genre a strong determining point for any literate form of speech or text production? Our choice of wordings, colloquiallisms and structures are quite different between a mail to a friend and a formal job application for example. We only learn the forms through exposure and trial.
My own method for teaching children with literacy problems is outlined on a small website I've built. http://manxman.ch/moodle2/course/view.php?id=4 I'd appreciate any constructive feedback or thoughts on the subject.
Best regards