Peter Atkinson: Literacy Techniques That Work

Total Literacy Techniques

by Persida Himmele, William Himmele, &er Keely Pott

The authors of Total Literacy Techniques provide a variety of strategies for assisting students in analyzing literature and informational texts.

They begin by emphasizing that there is a significance difference between “the language we speak and the language we read.” (4) The language of literature and informational texts is termed academic language. It contains sophisticated elements such as:

Grammatical metaphor

Informational density

Morphologically complex words (ie. multiple prefixes and suffixes)

A high degree of technicality and abstractness

Since academic language is complex, the authors argue that teachers need to make a “conscious and strategic effort” to help students acquire it. (9) This focus is particularly important for students who are delayed in the development of literacy skills because research confirms something called the Matthew effect: “Those who develop literacy skills earlier continue to progress, while those who develop them later continue to fall behind.” (6)

Effective starting points are reading high-interest literature and read-alouds. Students will more effectively acquire academic vocabulary these ways than through word walls and vocabulary lists. Stories and novels are a good starting point since context clues to the meaning of unfamiliar words are more evident in them than in informational texts. In support of exposing students to literature, the authors state that “Literature provides us with case studies in life.” (19) They encourage students to make connections, grow in their understanding of and empathy for people, and understand, question, and assess society and the world around them.

In Chapter 2, the authors provide several tips for helping students acquire academic language. They recommend audio books for bridging “the listening experience and the successful reading experience.” (26) Using context clues to infer the meaning of unfamiliar words is also a recommended strategy. Picture word walls, on which student pictures are posted beside new words, can be effective. Another strategy is collecting interesting words, through the use of bookmarks, while students read. Lastly, an academic language display can be used to showcase how a writer of an information text uses complex techniques such as metaphor and morphological complexity.

Chapter 3 provides teachers with strategies for helping students with higher-order thinking while reading. One important approach is to have students listen for bias. Students should read the text aloud and attend to words and phrases that reveal the author’s mood and perspective. Students can also read several texts that present different perspectives on a single issue. The relevance wheel is a diagram with 6 spokes leading out from a topic written in the middle. Students label the spokes with concepts they learned about the topic from their reading. Then, outside the wheel formed by the spokes, they indicate how each concept affects them and the world around them. Finally, there’s What’s it Really About?, whereby the teacher can address symbolic language by asking students 2 questions:

1. “All right, what’s it about”

2. (and then) “All right, but what’s it reeeeeeaaally about?”

Sample Relevance Wheel

The authors shift their focus, in Chapter 4, to strategies for supporting literary analysis. To begin with, teachers should conduct reader surveys to learn about their students’ reading experiences and needs. Students can benefit from processing bookmarks – a metacognitive strategy whereby students keep track of their thinking (in a margin or journal) as they are reading. To encourage students to read books outside their preferred genres, teachers can use a genre passport – recognition that “celebrates whenever students ‘travel to a different country’ by reading within a new genre.” (74) The WIDU Board (What I Don’t Understand) is a bulletin board on which students post, on index cards, questions about the story they are reading.

Chapter 5 presents several tools for reading informational texts. A key approach to understanding informational texts is exploring texts features such as:

Organizational markers – ie. titles, headings, subheadings

Enhanced text – ie. bold and italicized text

Visually organized text – ie. bulleted or numbered lists, textboxes
Reference features – ie. table of contents, glossary, index, appendices

Marking up the text is a strategy students can use to summarize what they have read and record their insights. After reading an article or chapter, they write a 3-sentence summary and record one “Aha” they had while reading. Concept mapping is an activity whereby students “physically manipulate” 10 to 20 concepts (each written on a an index card) encountered while reading in order to show how these concepts are related. (86) A more creative approach is a found poem – Students locate key words from the text they are reading and construct a poem with them. Lastly, students can be asked to create headings or subheadings for paragraphs in order to demonstrate their understanding of the main ideas.

Chapter 6 opens with a very important caution from the authors for teachers to opt for the Ripple as opposed to the Beach Ball approach to student responses in order to encourage higher-order thinking about texts. In the Beach Ball scenario, the teacher throws out a question and one student responds. In contrast, the ripple approach is a 3-step process:

All students individually respond to the prompt;

Small groups of students share their responses; and then,

The whole group shares.

Several Total Participation Tools for facilitating text-based student collaboration are then presented in the remainder of Chapter 6. Bounce cards allow students to perform 3 tasks: bounce ideas off each other, sum up what their peers have said, and ask questions of them. Bounce cards have starter phrases for each of these tasks:

“I agree with…” for responding to another student’s idea

“I hear you saying …” for summarizing

“Have you thought about …” for asking questions

Bounce cards

The picture walk is a pre-reading strategy whereby students, in groups, analyze pictures from the informational text prior to reading it. Another activity is the Likert scale. Students first select a position on a topic found in the text. Students then go to a spot in the room designated for Strongly Agree, Agree, Undecided, Disagree, or Strongly Disagree, depending on their thoughts. At this station, they meet and discuss their position with other students who hold the same opinion, and together, they write a statement that sums up their position. Finally, all Likert scale groups share their summary statements with each other so that students get all perspectives on the topic.

The authors conclude with a strategy called RACE for helping students construct persuasive essay-style responses: