Brandon Cruz
ED 638-40
Dr. M. Rivera
IRA Newsletter Project:
Effective Literacy Websites #7 - csal.gsu.edu
After
going over several resources for student literacy I felt it worth-while to
review the material targeting adult literacy. The Center for the Study of Adult
Literacy’s webpage, csal.gsu.edu, offers text passages that range between the
levels of 3rd and 8th grade designed to expose and
improve the most important areas of reading comprehension and literacy:
phonological awareness, morphological knowledge, decoding,
orthographic/irregular word reading, vocabulary, fluency, background/general
knowledge, text structure knowledge, reasoning skills, and memory retrieval
ability. While there are questions to be answered for the research team members
in order to help them in the effectiveness of their project, there are no
comprehension questions to answer for the reader regarding the passages. Also,
it seems that a few of the links in the topic categories for the passages are
now dead or unresponsive links along with a few that lead to homepages of other
adult literacy web pages instead of passages. The articles being categorized
first by difficulty (Easier, Medium, Harder) and then by specific subjects
(Health, Food, Babies, Fiction, Non-Fiction, Money, History, Etc.) makes it
easy to find something interesting to read to a broad public. The goal of just
getting people to read and improve their general knowledge is apparent as well
in the lack of any form of comprehension assessment.
What
immediately comes to mind as a teacher is the fact that documents sent home to
parents need to be of a literacy scope that is acceptable to parents of
multiple levels of education. Administration and workshops that have covered
this aspect have generalized an average Flesch-Kincaid readability score
between 5 and 8 to ensure that a piece of text is able to be understood without
difficulty or miscommunication. This project by CSAL is a step in the right
direction, in my opinion, in the attempt to promote the general literacy of the
adult public. True, getting adults to sit and read through things may take a
little bit of orchestration, if not some sort of completion/reward system.
However, I truly see this as a step in the right direction in the improvement
of the general public education.
Often
when working with ESL or ELL students their parents are often in the same boat
as the student about language acquisition and use. This applies to some
students whom fall under the middle to low tiers of the socioeconomic brackets.
It isn’t perfect and still requires a lot of work and effort on both sides of
the field, but resources such as the passages found on CSAL’s site are a nice
starting point.
No comments:
Post a Comment