With my background being Language Arts and ESL, I was already familiar with a large part of the content taught in this course. I do not mean to say this mean that I didn't learn anything from our class. On the contrary, I think that this was one of my favorite and more practical courses that I have taken. Perhaps it was because learning about the content was secondary to discussing and applying the content (at least in my case). I also liked discussing specific terms or models of instruction. For example, when discussing reading comprehension we were introduced to before, during, and after reading activities. This is a model that I plan to use quite a lot as a Language Arts teacher and I appreciated the time spent to draw our own applications through the development of lesson plans.
One aspect of literacy that I had not touched on so extensively in my previous classes what that of vocabulary instruction. While I knew the importance of word selection (7-10 thematically connected words) I had not developed a firm understanding of how to deliver this instruction to students. Having participated in discussions with my peers and through listening to the lessons given, I understand that contextualization is necessary for a student's understanding of the vocabulary. In my own discipline, I hope to additionally teach students reading skills that will strengthen their ability to use context clues to determine word meaning. I also now know that one instructional asset that I have while helping students to improve their personal lexicon is educating them on morphemes and root words. An acquaintance with these will allow students to predict and interpret the possible meanings of unfamiliar words. For ESL students, teaching cognates might help them to interpret meanings of words that look and sound similar between English and their native language.
I thought that going over critical literacy was beneficial to everyone in the class. In my ESL classes, there is a large stress to teach critical literacy to our students and to be critical learners/teachers ourselves. To many that I have talked to outside of my program, critical literacy is unfamiliar territory. Personally, I plan to teach critical literacy by presenting my students with a number of perspectives on various issues. This may be done assignment to assignment or by providing students access to texts from many perspectives, such as Text Sets in the classroom . I might also incorporate digital literacy during critical literacy instruction by asking students to critically analyze the sources that they might be using in a paper. What biases do the sources display? How reliable is the source and how do we know?
Overall, this course further convinced me that in order to help our students develop literacy in our content areas, we cannot simply expect that bringing student to the content will be enough. We need to bring content to our students. We need to draw from their experiences and their background knowledge if we expect them to actively interact with the academic material that is given to them.
