Sequencing Lit Activities Sequencing Literacy

Sequencing Lit Activities

Sequencing Literacy Activities teacher is about to start on a unit of work on the environment. Her ultimate aim is for her students to be able to comprehend and produce written factual descriptive texts on the subject using technical vocabulary and a scientific register as described in the syllabus.

This step of pre-planning highlights how, before even dealing with the class, the teacher sets forth what she wishes to accomplish with her lesson.

She knows this might be ahead of where the students are 'at' but she is determined to help them acquire the necessary literacy skills for more academically orientated work.

This teacher sets ambitious goals for her students, which means that the lesson is likely to be valuable for them on many levels.

The first thing the teacher does is to inform the students as to what the series of lessons is going to be about by giving the students the program and discussing the relevant syllabus outcomes.

This is the first step the teaches deploys before the classroom, not only because it has 'first' as a guideline, but because a teacher, no matter what the lesson, must make the class cognizant of the syllabus overview, and give the students an idea of where they will be 'going' as a class and as individual learners over the next few weeks.

She relates these concepts to the students' own writing and the notion of text and context in general.

The teacher makes her lesson aims clear to the students, not just the content of the subject overall.

The teacher then outlines the assessment procedures of the whole unit, which incorporate some negotiable aspects like due dates, length and mark weighting.

Students are given a map of where the lesson plan will be going in the next few weeks.

She doesn't know how much background they have in the area, so she produces stimulus pictures of polluted environments, dividing the students into small groups and asking them to brainstorm possible words and phrases associated with the stimulus pictures.

The students are going to be doing more intensive group work later on, so this familiarizes them with one another as learners and barnstormers, as well as the general topic. From the beginning, the "learning cycle" is honored so, students can "make their own discoveries, stressing the process of science as a way of learning." (Reinhardt, 2004)

The teacher distributes some pollution case studies and proceeds to read them with the students following. Questions and discussion follow.

In this case, the lesson plan is about pollution. So the students have an idea of what the topic area is, they read about the effects of the phenomenon in the world outside the classroom, from objective sources.

The teacher then produces a model text on a related but different pollution topic, which incorporates some of the desirable features of technical description.

Now, the learning and lesson plan model the students will be actually dealing with is presented, along with a more specific topic area and language of discussion. Through context, students become aware of new vocabulary in literary locations they are likely to encounter such words, rather than in isolation.

She distributes the model, then reads the text and discusses the meanings especially concentrating on the purposes or uses of factual texts, the reasons for their 'objective' registers and their intended audiences.

By stressing purpose or use, students focus more on holistic meaning, rather than getting 'hung up' on difficult terminology. This deploys the 'whole language' method, whereby students incorporate the meaning of language into their cognitive resources and daily dialogue by seeing it in context and using it, rather than memorizing it. (University of West Sydney, 2004)

As the students offer related words and phrases, she, where appropriate, introduces key technical term as substitutes for the "commonsense" ones offered by the students and writes them down. Each individual student then records the words and phrases in the form of the semantic map in their workbook.

Students learn to relate difficult words to personal terms and experiences, while still retaining the original words in their learning databases of memory.

Next, the teacher, through questioning and eliminating, reduces the categories and establishes consensus on the order of information expected to be found. She also gets the students to consider the search terms that might get results. Once this in done a scaffold is constructed using the established order.

Still, in a group setting, students use personal semantic maps and begin to learn to create a collective scaffold of meaning in a way that is meaningful to their cognitive processes -- they learn how to learn, and how to communicate that learning in a classroom environment to the teacher and to their peers. (Grid of Constructs about Learning, 2004)

The teacher then takes the students to the computer room where they search the net for information that pertains to their particular category. They add the additional information that they have found their section of the scaffold.

This adds technical reinforcement and research capabilities to the assignment and introduces the scaffolding process in a non-threatening fashion. "Clay and Cazden (1992) point out two scaffolding strategies in teaching reading: working with new knowledge and accepting partially correct responses. In the first strategy, when a teacher suspects the child does not have the ideas or words needed for a particular text, he/she may explain some part of the story or contrast a feature presented with something he/she knows the child understands from another reading. In the second strategy, the teacher uses what is correct in the student's response but probes or cues the student, so as to suggest good possibilities for active consideration." ("Scaffolding," 2004)

She then sets another small group task: students are to predict what kinds of general information categories they would expect to find on environmental pollution if they where to research environmental pollution on the World Wide Web.

As well as the larger group project, students are given a more focused, time specific assignment so they do not waste the period in the computer room -- a possible risk in a diffuse environment outside of the classroom.