Literacy Across the Curriculum

Both staff and learners take responsibility to raise standards in literacy. This starts with an expectation that learners should respond in full sentences and in Standard English; teachers are expected to model this, to challenge poor oracy, grammar and to provide learners with the vocabulary necessary for a high-level response. Before setting their learners to write, teachers model the process of writing: the reading, the thinking, the oracy, the planning, the drafting and the editing.

Integral in developing learners’ wider reading and reading for betterment is how teachers facilitate reading for meaning through using a range of teaching methods and approaches such as:

• Skimming -Skimming is reading rapidly in order to get a general overview of the material.
• Scanning - Scanning is reading rapidly in order to find specific facts.
• Comprehension - To comprehend a text means a reader must accurately understand written material by decoding what is read, making connections between what they have read and what they already know and thinking deeply about this.
• Inference - Making an inference involves using what a reader already knows to make a guess about what they don't know. Readers who make inferences use the clues in the text along with their own experiences to help them figure out what is not directly said by the writer.
• Synthesising - Synthesising a text is the process of pulling together background knowledge, newly learned ideas, connections and inferences into a complete and original understanding of the text.