Strategies for students

with low literacy

How can I incorporate literacy strategies into
my teaching that improve the achievement of
students with lower levels of literacy?

The issue

Why is this important?

Reading and writing are the primary means through which learning and information is
communicated, accessed and assessed.

Cross-curriculum barriers to success

In all subject areas, secondary school students encounter increasing expectations of
the complexity of literacy required (Ministry of Education, 2004).

Limiting potential
A strong foundation of literacy skills gives students the means to formulate new
knowledge and express their knowledge and ideas.

NCEA Assessment
Written assessment is the predominant means of formal assessment in NZ.

Todays information heavy world

It is crucial that we are enabling students to engage with and independently critique
information

What does the literature

say?

All learning strategies need to be deliberately taught the

teacher will need to explain the purpose of each strategy and
model it several times. The students will need multiple
opportunities to practise (Ministry of Education, 2004, p. 11).

Plethora of literacy strategies - have to identify specific issue

you want to address

Different subjects use language in very different ways important to teach subject-specific literacy strategies
(Wilson, 2013).

Maori, Pasifika and students from low socio-economic areas

are less likely to be exposed to complex texts and higher
levels of critical thinking (Wilson, Madjar, & Mcnaughton, S,
2016).

Inquiry Outline
Cycle One

Cycle Three

Identified issue

Mindmaps, writing frames

and formative assessment

Cycle Two

Final assessment

Subject-specific vocabulary
strategies

Summative assessment and

reflection

Baseline Data
For both Year 10 classes, I marked their paragraphs for their end of unit assessments. This gave me a
baseline and identified issues to work on. I also identified three priority students to work with: Elijah and
Ben.

First focus: subject-specific vocabulary

People need to know words and terms in order to develop language and in-depth thinking.
A learners vocabulary knowledge strongly influences their ability to comprehend what they read and
to write effectively (Ministry of Education, 2004).
Students need to learn new, subject-specific terms for every subject that they study at secondary
school (Wilson, 2013).
First need to establish what vocabulary expertise the students bring with them.

What I did?
Predicting, defining and drawing new words.
This strategy raises students awareness of key
words and encourages them to think about
their understanding of what these words
mean.

Impact?
Students recall and use of these words
increased, as reflected in their book work.

Next steps?
Students now need to learn how to put these
words into practice in their writing.

Also did revision

activities for Do
Nows over 2 weeks

Mindmaps
Students have more knowledge than is reflected in
their writing.

Why?
Students need a way to organise information so
they know how to include it in their writing.

What the literature says?

Helps students to understand key words and
ideas; enables them to identify relationships
between these words and ideas (Ministry of
Education, 2004)

How?
First focused on what are and locating hard
facts; modelled mindmapping; structured
activity growing mindmap in pairs using
newspaper articles

Impact?
Increased use of hard facts and detail in writing.

Next steps?
Students still struggling with how to structure a paragraph and how to
organise these hard facts within their writing. Next step is therefore to develop
paragraph structure.

Writing Frames
Why?
To scaffold paragraph writing for students,
modelling how to structure a paragraph and
giving a starting point for students who get
stuck (Ministry of Education, 2004).

How I used them?

Using their mindmaps, had them write a
paragraph using the writing frame if needed.

Impact?
Gave struggling students somewhere to start
and build their paragraphs from. Those who
didnt need it used their own sentence starters.

Summative Assessment
Ben and Elijah both improved their writing by incorporating more specific information and improving the structure of
their writing.

Data
Same task (different question) and same marking criteria, however students had more time
and preparation for Summative Assessment.

Previous Unit
Assessment

Summative
Assessment

Ben

20%

80%

Elijah

40%

86%

Class average

67.6%

81.3%

Reflections

Students need multiple times to practice strategies (Ministry of Education, 2004). I had time
restrictions in implementing my inquiry - students had 2-3 times per strategy only.

Needed more time to practice. The paragraph on tropical cyclones was by far the strongest
because they had already wrote on in class previously.

Needed to explicitly teach and model paragraph writing - assumed they would already be very
familiar with this but they were not.

Needed clearer success criteria.

Next Steps?
Explicitly teaching paragraph writing
Functional language analysis (Fang & Schleppegrell,
2010)

Bibilography