Literacy is vital to an individual’s functioning in society; there is an association with social interaction, content exploration, and academic success. Though individuals might be street smart, they will not function adequately in all settings. Being literate provides for career advancement and promotes confidence and self-efficacy. To achieve success in literacy teaching, educators should merge the students’ cultures so that students can make a link and develop confidence as they learn the fundamentals. Literacy teaching must be supported through reading and writing across the curriculum. To accomplish this, teachers will need to interpret the standards of the curriculum in a way that can inform the instruction to properly integrate literacy across and within the disciplines through the efforts of collaboration as no one teacher can adequately accomplish this on their own. For students to be critical consumers and producers of text, they will need to learn in ways that make sense to them and apply these ideas to real-world writing uses. For example, they may need to learn to argue and argue to learn, learn to disagree agreeably, bring critical analysis to what they read, use writing to persuade both their ideas and collective positions, while always considering that actual writing has an audience ( Routman, 2004; Tompkin, 2011 cited in Brock, et al. 2014, p. 7).
Strategies That Will Be Most Beneficial to Diverse Learner Groups
Selecting suitable teaching strategies to fit diverse learner needs will depend on the educator's cultural responsiveness and knowledge.
The teaching instruction within a diverse classroom requires fidelity in utilizing the teaching strategies to ensure consistency and success. Like any other learner group, the scaffolding of the lessons is necessary to ensure learners understand and retain the lesson.
The utilization of instructional methodologies such as ability/mix heterogeneous grouping with students of different abilities can help each other learn the concepts and maximize the time constraints of the lessons and complexity of the task.
This strategy is akin to the family as Hispanic students are accustomed to family bonding. Individualization is a strategy of consideration, but if one is unable to plan given the number of students in the class, then differentiation (differentiated learning) of the instruction will help the learners process the information while monitoring the pacing of the lesson and difficulty level of the task. With this in mind, clarification can be done promptly; this will allow the teacher to match lesson activities with learner needs and provide structure as this learner group requires stability for learning.
To further aid in the retention of learning, another strategy that can compensate for highflyer or under-achiever Hispanic learners is high-end learning, where students are pulled out of the class and fitted with a specialist or another grade level teacher. This approach facilitates the learner if the teacher does not sufficiently know the content.
The infusion of technology devices such as computers and the internet where students can write blogs about the content they are learning will further aid students with their learning.
How to Use Fiction or Non-Fiction Activities When Incorporating Writing Across The Curriculum (WAC)
Deciding when to use either of the two activities (fiction and non-fiction) for learning if the lesson is about the development of the mind/ abstract thinking in the form of informational literacy, therefore, engages the mind, thereby having students write for different reasons that they may develop control over language structure and visual features. The selection between one or the other depends on whether writing is for building reading skills, questioning skills, and development of thought.
The instructor should think about what skills they want to develop in the students. To write proficiently is an art that takes time to master, requires diligent practice, and is connected to the foundational principles of parts of speech and grammar.
Fiction or non-fiction activities will be selected if the intended purpose is to expose students to real-life situations and have students understand reality, simulation, or role-play, thereby showing the practicality of life.
To develop readiness to learn by developing students' curiosity and subjective nature, students can build their arguments, perception, inferences, and public speaking debate skills will be enhanced.
When the lesson is about building confidence, teachers can allow students to select from a genre of fictional activities based on their preference, and this way, it will be for volume and passion. Attention can be given to the structure and grammar.
The selection will also depend on whether the teacher is building social skills as fictional activities can help students build pro-social skills and vocabulary.
If the need is to have students develop their creative writing skills, then through fictional reading, their imagination can become expanded, thereby helping to build their problem-solving ad creative thinking skills that can lead to adaptation to changes and the building of new ideas.
Use of Technology to enhance WAC
Teaching literacy has been explored using various instructional strategies, technology in the classroom serves to augment learning; literacy education has the potential to be fundamentally enhanced by educational technology tools such as intelligent tutoring system (ITS), automated writing evaluation (AWE) system, and text readability tools (Crossley and McNamara, 2017, p. 1). Classroom environments are full of complexity and dynamism; literacy's purpose is to positively impact the students, which most educators have done over the years by getting to know their students to provide meaningful and challenging experiences.
Utilizing the technology to offset or support student-centered learning gives the students more control over their preferred learning styles, which will support the development of 21st-century skills such as creativity and problem-solving.
A combined effect can occur by personalizing the learning towards the needs of the students' strengths, allowing them to be accountable and invested in their learning outcome when using this technology, thereby teaching responsibility.
Through customization of the lesson, students can work at their own pace (addition of more time or work); this then allows for mediation by the teacher, in so doing will build self-directed skills in the students, which will lead to empowerment in the classroom.
Teaching literacy with technology builds students' capacity as it fosters researching skills as students have unlimited access to information to use in their essay writing. Literacy entails sight word recognition and speaking, which is utilized in comprehension to allow students to make connections while critiquing. It creates colors and lets reading and writing be like a kaleidoscope through animated art forms.
Teacher preparedness is of utmost importance to delivering lessons that focus on writing across the curriculum. To achieve success in literacy, writing across the curriculum must compliment the diversity of the student's cultural background and technology infusion. Teacher aversion toward technology use is also a consideration and needs support to ensure effective use in disseminating the lessons. Teacher preparation for technology integration is minimal. Given the constantly evolving nature of technology, interactive communication among teachers and students is critical to providing meaningful technology-related experiences for literacy skill-building (Taffe and Gwinn, 2007).
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