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Effective Literacy Instruction

Effective literacy instruction builds a foundation on specific principles. Literacy instructors need to implement strategies that will help them deliver student-based learning that will produce highly literate students.

Differentiated Instruction - Elementary

Literacy teaching can only be described as truly effective when it positively impacts student learning. Successful teachers are able to skillfully integrate a range of instructional approaches and resources to meet the diverse learning needs of their students.”
(Sheena Hervey, Chief Learning Officer, Generation Ready, 2021)

Hervey offers the following as characteristics of effective literacy teachers:

  • They know and understand the literacy processes and instruction needed that best address their students’ learning styles and needs.
  • They know and understand the standards and how they influence what their students need to learn and understand.
  • They know their students and their unique standing as learners.
  • They establish high expectations for their students and encourage them to take risks as they learn from their mistakes.
  • They are flexible and use a range of relevant teaching practices and strategies.
  • They endeavor to engage their students in challenging and thought-provoking learning experiences.

Research studies have identified six strategies in the primary grades that improve readers’ comprehension and therefore serve as effective literacy strategies:

  • Activating prior knowledge, relating personal experience, or predicting what will happen in a text
  • Asking questions while reading
  • Visualizing or ‘painting a picture in your mind’ of what is being read
  • Monitoring or checking for understanding while reading
  • Drawing inferences
  • Summarizing or retelling

(IES, 2010)

While these characteristics and strategies will help literacy instructors be more effective, there are also many established common practices that are considerably less effective. Dr. Nell Duke, professor in literacy, language, and culture at the University of Michigan, recommends that instructors should abandon the five following literacy practices:

  • Do not simply give lists of vocabulary words for students to look up. This practice does not work well because it requires little engagement or active learning on the part of the students in using the words in tasks that will build understanding regarding the meaning of the words.
  • Do not give students prizes for reading. This practice undermines any motivation students might have to read for the sake of simply enjoying the act of reading.
  • Do not give weekly spelling tests. Like the first item, this practice does not work well because even if students recall how to spell words on a list, they will not necessarily learn the meanings of the words or how to use them in context.
  • Do not give unsupported independent reading assignments. This practice alone does not facilitate literacy unless it is paired with specific instruction and response activities related to the reading.
  • Do not punish students by taking away recess. This practice is detrimental because it reduces students’ attention to or interest in reading activities when they are not allowed to engage in physical exercise breaks.

Balanced literacy instruction is the belief and practice of combining reading and writing learning activities as a collaborative process. These activities include shared reading, reading aloud, guided reading, close reading, word and vocabulary study, interactive writing, and reading and writing workshops (EnglishBix, 2021).

In a balanced approach to literacy instruction, teachers integrate instruction with authentic reading and writing and experiences so that students learn how to use literacy strategies and skills and have opportunities to apply what they are learning. Balanced literacy instruction is focused on shared reading, guided reading, and independent reading and incorporates as many of the following 10 components as possible:

  1. Reading
  2. Phonics and related skills
  3. Strategies
  4. Vocabulary
  5. Comprehension
  6. Literature
  7. Content-area study
  8. Oral language
  9. Writing
  10. Spelling

Skilled readers don’t just process information from the text. They bring information to the act of reading. This comes from prior knowledge of language, experiences in the real world, and each individual reader’s understandings about texts. For young readers, it is the knowledge they bring to their reading including their vocabulary and knowledge of language that give them their starting point for connecting with a text.

The diversity among students entering our schools means that teachers need to be able to identify and build on what their students bring to the classroom. They need to know their students as literacy learners.

A teacher’s job is always to bridge from the known to the new. Because there really is no other choice. Kids are who they are. They know what they know. They bring what they bring. Our job is not to wish that students knew more or knew differently. Our job is to turn each student’s knowledge, along with the diversity of knowledge we will encounter in a classroom of learners, into a curricular strength rather than an instructional inconvenience.”
(Pearson, 1997)

When the teacher follows a gradual release model as shown below, he or she can model what good readers and writers do, share in authentic experiences with the students as they practice the skills, and then release them to implement the skills independently so that they may become successful. The gradual release model “emphasizes instruction that mentors students into becoming capable thinkers and learners when handling the tasks with which they have not yet developed expertise” (Buehl, 2005).

Balanced literacy sits in the middle of both the whole language approach and the phonics approach. With whole language, the belief is that students learn to read and write best by engaging in the language through a system involving word recognition and the relationships of words to one another in context. This approach works best with visual learners. The phonics approach teaches letter and sound relationships (the phonological system of language). This works best with auditory learners. In balanced literacy instruction, the teacher is able to provide whole language learning through interactive read-alouds, shared reading, and shared writing. Explicit phonics instruction is provided during word study and guided reading time.

Balanced literacy instruction is differentiated instruction. The teacher is able to differentiate learning during guided reading, literacy stations, word study, independent reading and writing. It allows the teacher to meet students where they are.

Assignment:

For this assignment, you will write a report about your views on literacy instruction.

Address the following points in one-to-two paragraphs each. Be sure to include proper citations for the resources you use, including those provided in the course.

  • Which principles and practices of effective literacy teaching do you feel most confident in implementing? Which do you find challenging and need to learn more about? Explain why.
  • Why do you believe Dr. Duke recommends abandoning the practices listed in this lesson? Do you agree or disagree? Explain why.
  • How have you used balanced literacy in your classroom?

Once you have completed your responses, save them in a document in MS Word format (.doc or .docx) and use the tool below to upload a copy of your completed work.