Literacy Development in Language as Subject

Mike Fleming

Changing ideas about literacy development in language as subject

Tensions

Relationship between language as subject and language in other subjects

Outline

Traditional

Moving On

Maturing

Changing ideas

focus on reading and writing narrow range of texts restricted types of writing emphasis on systems and structures product-oriented

Traditional

importance of using language context and meaning re-conception of relationship between

language and learning personal growth creativity, self-expression

Moving On

more balanced perspective importance of explicit knowledge broader range of reading and writing genres skills and strategies needed for reading importance of meta-cognition greater attention to issues of progression

and depth.

Maturing Ideas

Changing perspectives

New literacies

Critical literacy

Concept of literacy

detailed aspects of literacy development

attitude to descriptors and competencies

Tensions

Pupils at age 11 should read a wide range of texts including novels, poems, newspaper articles, reports etc.

Pupils should be able to:extract and interpret information, events, main points and ideas from texts;infer and deduce meanings, recognising the writers’ intentions;understand how meaning is constructed within sentences and across texts as a whole;select and compare information from different texts;assess the usefulness of texts, sift the relevant from the irrelevant and distinguish between fact and opinion; etc.

How meaning is constructed within sentences:recognise the effect of different connectives, identify how phrases and clauses build relevant detail and information;understand how modal or qualifying words or phrases build shades of meaning; understand how the use of adverbials, prepositional phrases andnon-finite clauses gives clarity and emphasis to meaning.

The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist

“...for us as human beings there are two fundamentally opposed realities, two different modes of experience…In one we experience the live, complex, embodied, world; in the other we give the kind of attention that isolates, fixes, and makes each thing explicit”

(McGilchrist, 2009: 3, 31)

logical precise restricted mechanical narrow attention

open fluid tolerant of

ambiguities broad contextual

perception

holistic analytic (1)

holistic

analytic (2)

Literacy a narrow‘ basic skill’ taught discretely

Language as subject seen as a service subject

Undue concern about coverage and overlap

Language elements are taught discretely and systematically in a linear fashion

Analytic (1) LS and LOS

Support tool for teaching - not mechanistic but in context

Better sense of the difficulty of tasks being set (writing tasks, levels of reading required)

Diagnostic tool Broadening of outcomes

Improving pedagogy

Analytic (2) LS and LOS

‘systematic’ ‘transparency’ ‘transversal’

Dangers of misinterpreting concepts such as