Literacy

Talk about Books is an oral language programme that involves intensive work by teacher aides with individual children. The results of the study outlined in this article show that it effectively enhances oral language development in young learners from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.

In literacy learning situations, teachers frequently fix errors before helping children find errors. This can be a source of confusion for students, especially when they are experiencing difficulty or when a task is hazy. This article describes a process of self-monitoring that helps children identify errors. It is based on three crucial steps—noticing, questioning and judging one’s own concrete behaviour in relation to a current task.

Few studies have ever shown the improved results of an intervention project continuing after that programme has finished. Is it possible to achieve sustainability and what factors would contribute to it? This article looks at one programme that sustained gains and how it was done.

Pasifika students do not generally achieve as well as other students in school assessments of literacy and there are concerns about their comprehension of text. This article examines the out-of-school literacy experiences of 14 Pasifika students, with a view to enabling teachers to link to and build on them. Church and Sunday school are important sites for literacy in Samoan and English outside school.

If literacy learning needs to change for the 21st century, when students need to deal with new formats, such as blogs, sound clips and YouTube, what does this mean in practice in the classroom? This article gives a possible framework for thinking about multimodal literacy skills and shows how it relates to real examples of student learning.

This article draws on the findings of a recent Ministry of Education commissioned evaluation of the CD ROM The Game and other stories. It focuses on possible reasons for the positive impact of classroom use of this resource on students’ attitudes to reading and perceptions of themselves as readers.