Chapter 7 - Literacy Strategies for the Secondary School

Summary

Introduction

Two reading issues that exist in middle to secondary schools that impact a student's academic achievement are vocabulary development and comprehension ability. The Language Experience Approach (LEA) can be utilized to enhance both factors for lower-achieving students. Cunningham and Stanovich (1997) indicate the powerful and lasting effects of vocabulary knowledge on student's reading comprehension. Rasinski and Padak (2004) indicate fluency will get a student nowhere without knowing the meaning of words. Comprehension depends on the accurate understanding of the meaning of words and the ability to infer the meaning of unknown words encountered in reading (Roberts et al. 2008). These statements need little explanation. A word caller or a reader with limited vocabulary knowledge will not be the most successful student. Additionally, the student must have the ability to retain and retrieve the meaning of vocabulary words to fully comprehend the text during reading and for successful completion of assessments.

The use of visual literacy aids such as graphic organizers for developing comprehension and ready recall aids in building comprehension (Kim et al. 2004). Visual displays of information help students organize thoughts and aid in the recall of information. Sadoski and Paivio (2013) corroborate these findings and propose that information is stored in two different codes, verbal and visual. With these points in mind, strategies developed utilizing both vocabulary development and visual displays of information are embedded in LEA to aid students experiencing these problems.

Teaching the literacy process in secondary education involves using methods that can support student development and reading to learn in different curricular areas. Expository or informational text style and structure are sometimes more difficult for students to follow than story structure. Because the vocabulary in informational texts is particular to a specific field, it tends to be more abstract and the sentence structure is more elaborate. Imagery is often lacking and needs to be supplied by the reader.

Teaching Academic Vocabulary

Research has shown that gaps in reading achievement are often associated with gaps in vocabulary knowledge (Scott et al. 2003; Watts 1995). Developing language skills is not a focus in most secondary schools. Scott et al. (2003) observed 23 ethnically diverse classrooms and found that only 6% of school time was concentrated on vocabulary development, and in core academic subject areas, only 1.4% of instructional time was spent expanding vocabulary.