View Content #19906

By Stephanie Knight, CASLS Language Technology Specialist

To endeavor to teach literacy skills across subject areas without recognizing their inherent differences is short-sighted. As Unsworth (2001) mentions in his discussion of Wyatt-Smith and Cummings (1999), each subject area has its own most common text types and associated grammatical forms. Thus, though all teachers must be experts at imparting literacy skills to students, teachers should use a nuanced approach that is relevant to the expectations and conventions of the subject area in which communication occurs. Given the cross-curricular nature of language however, world language teachers cannot focus on the literacy demands of one or two subject areas but rather have to focus on the literacy demands of all subject areas.

Consider, for example, the thematic approach of the current AP Spanish and IB Diploma Program curricula. In both approaches, students are required to study disparate topics including science and technology, global issues, and customs in the Spanish-speaking world. It holds evident then that a student in either class would be expected to know how to interpret and create a breadth of text types including reports, sets of instructions, short stories, blogs about current events, and informative articles about historical events. Of course, these expectations are included in addition to expectations regarding conventions required for interpersonal communication.

Given these broad expectations and the relative proportion of what is known to what is unknown for emerging second language learners, world language teachers must be particularly intentional in creating learning opportunities for students. An easy way to contend with this cumbersome load of expectations is for teachers to use what is taught in other subject areas to their advantage-especially when activating prior knowledge and building schemata when dealing with unknown information. In doing so, students will be empowered by knowledge acquired in other subject areas.

Lists of pre-reading and pre-listening activities are ubiquitous and easily accessed on the internet. When creating these activities, remember the following suggestions.

1. Scaffold when necessary, but have students complete these activities with as little direct instruction as possible in order to avoid limiting student thinking.
2. Choose sources that are authentic rather than realistic. Authentic sources are superior because they offer more opportunities for student discovery and evaluation of a target language’s use by expert speakers.
3. Make sure that your students are well-versed in conventions regarding text types.
4. Use texts to help students infer both word meaning and the rules of syntax.

Teaching literacy is not something that is done in addition to teaching content. It is, in effect, how one teaches content. Though the literacy demands on world language students and teachers are considerable, they pose a great opportunity for world language teachers to both use cross-curricular connections to build relevance for students and to be pedagogical leaders in their respective institutions given their familiarity with teaching a variety of text types.

References

Unsworth, Len (2001). Teaching multiliteracies across the curriculum: Changing contexts of text and image in classroom practice. Retrieved from http://christurnerpractice.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/54477805/Unsworth%20Book.pdf.