Barton, G., & Woolley, G. (2017). Developing literacy in the secondary classroom. SAGE Publications.
The reading offers an insight into the meaning of literacy for today’s learners and suggests several strategies on how to teach it successfully. Beforehand, the authors discuss potential obstacles, including disabilities, a cycle of failure, and the absence of motivation, and provide a socio-linguistic background to the literacy acquisition process. One of the suggested strategies is problem-based learning that occurs while students collaborate with each other. It makes literacy teaching simultaneously personalized and cooperative, which is possible because one is able to contribute to the bigger task and take ownership of the process. The problems should be authentic and engaging; their completion should imply success, which requires certain discussion skills to be developed during the collaborative work. Those, in turn, will reflect the targeted areas of literacy the teacher wishes to develop. Thus, the reading highlights several strategies in context, and one of them is collaborative problem-based learning that can be used for reading and writing.
Brunow, V. (2016). Authentic literacy experiences in the secondary classroom.Language and Literacy Spectrum, 26, 60-74. Web.
The author recounts her experience of teaching literacy and facing the absence of engagement from the students. She is a proponent of the workshop model, which involves student-selected materials and progress monitoring. It has so-called mini-lessons focusing on reading, writing, or both. Then, the author suggests several tools and strategies for developing reading literacy within the model. One of them is close reading, which is a written task aiming to deepen one’s understanding of plot and story elements. It implies that a student assimilates the obtained textual information with their previous experience, and the challenge is not to focus on the latter. As a result, learners become authentic readers with enhanced literacy in both writing and reading. Overall, the article presents a whole learning model to consider and several strategies, one of which appears particularly beneficial.