Lorena D. Meliston
There are many things that would come out in our minds when we hear or talk about academic literacy. According to D.J Short and S. Fitzsimmons, “It includes a person’s ability in reading, writing, and oral discourse for school; and this requires knowledge of multiple genres of texts, purposes for text use, and text media. This literacy is influenced by students’ literacy in contexts outside the school; and by students’ personal, social, and cultural experiences.” Academic literacy is big issue that is to be faced by both children, and especially by adolescent English language learners. Although there are a lot or researches that are focused on the solutions for such challenge, the still remain elusive because of the variation of the language acquisition and levels of the learners.
There are six major challenges cited by Short and Fitzsimmon in their study to improve literacy among ELLs. These are the results based on advisory meetings and literature review, but only five of them are applicable for Filipino ELLs.
The first issue is the Lack of Appropriate Assessments. The challenge is that the schools, district, and states are required to demonstrate that ELLs are making progress not only in meeting academic standards but also in becoming fully proficient in English. The executive summary (August 2006) for the recent National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth report noted that adequate assessments are essential for gauging the individual strengths and weaknesses of language-minority students, making placement decisions, and tailoring instruction to meet student needs. Both diagnostic assessments prior to instruction to determine a student’s strengths, weaknesses, knowledge, and skills, and formative assessments to provide ongoing information concerning the student’s progress should be used.
The second issue is the Inadequate Educator Capacity to Improve the Literacy of ELLs. The issue that is common among teachers, especially in secondary is that they have a little professional development for teaching literacy to adolescents. This lack of adequate teacher development conflicts with the fact that the relationship between literacy proficiency and academic achievement grows stronger as grade levels rise—regardless of individual student characteristics (Biancarosa & Snow, 2004; Kamil, 2003). The most possible solution to this situation is that educators should be built with capacity to develop literacy skills in teaching adolescents and they should undergo a lot of trainings and workshops to increase their knowledge and proficiency in teaching.
The next issue cited is Lack of Appropriate and Flexible Program Options. The challenge that is associated to this one is that there must be a program suited to help ELLs become proficient in English. Finding an appropriate program that will accelerate their English language development and let them make progress in content-area coursework is the ultimate goal, therefore, the need to make and find a program that is reliable to address the challenge should be done as the growing number of ELLs are rising as of today.
The other one is Limited Use of Research-Based Instructional Practices. The issue that lies with it is that many ELLs with weak literacy skills have difficulty tracking the flow of information on cluttered text pages. No matter what program design is selected or what educational plan is developed for an adolescent ELL, the instruction in the courses should account for the students’ second language development needs as well as their content-knowledge requirements. There is a review of the research and of the model programs which cited practices that are potentially effective for developing literacy of the adolescents. The first practice is to integrate all four language skills- the reading, writing, listening, and speaking across the curriculum from the start, regardless of the student’s proficiency level. The next is to teach the components and processes of reading and writing; the other is to teach reading comprehension strategies; the next one is to focus on vocabulary development; build and activate background knowledge; teach language through content and themes; and the last one is to use the native language strategically. These practices might have disadvantages and disadvantages, but somehow they help adult learners to develop their literacy.
The last issue is Lack of a Strong and Coherent Research Agenda for Adolescent. His can be solved through a mix target of quantitative and qualitative studies that should be done to generate and test new literacy interventions for adolescent. Such interventions would be helpful to examine the ways in which native language literacy transfers to second language literacy for a particular age group, to find out whether adding a specialized academic literacy course to a high school ELL student’s daily schedule yields a difference in performance, and to identify best strategies for literacy coaches working with the ELL population.
The need to be academically literate should be one of the desires and goals of everyone because this helps an individual to become more competitive globally.
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