Four Tips For Teaching A Literacy Class

Hands down, foundation literacy is the most challenging level to teach in language instruction. In fact, it’s a completely different universe from the other CLB levels, even CLB 1. If you’ve ever taught a literacy class, along with a CLB 1 class, as I did this year, you’ll see how dramatic the differences are between the students. A teacher sees that the approaches, strategies, and pedagogy they use for the other levels don’t apply to a literacy class. With that in mind, here are four hard-earned principles I learned from my past year teaching literacy.

Four Principles of Literacy Teaching

1. Keep it Simple

Simplicity is the most important advice I can give. I can’t stress it enough. For example, the received wisdom for learning a language is to learn a word a day. Not for literacy. Two words a week, okay. Even then, keep them to one syllable. And make them nouns so you can use pictures.

Two words of advice. One, if a lesson is going sideways, it’s probably because you’ve complicated matters. Second, always ask yourself: how can I simplify this hand-out, activity, task, point? There’s no such thing as too simple in literacy.

2. Repetition – The name of the game

Repetition is key. It’s a good idea to repeat things. This principle goes hand in hand with the first one. There’s so much stuff coming at literacy learners every single class that they hardly know what’s important and what’s not. So, picking a few words and finding different and creative ways to reinforce them is key to learning. Also, use the repetition method, where the teacher repeats a word over and over and over. It works for this level.

3. Scaffold

Free activities should be kept to a bare minimum. Set-up activities so that students know exactly what to do. Take the guess work out of their tasks.

With worksheets, for instance, students should know exactly what to do. Also, you should lead them to the answer. Make the word-picture match-ups, the missing letters, etc. obvious. Remember, at the literacy level, reading is word recognition, not comprehension. Writing is copying.

4. Independent Learning

It’s important to give time for students to work on their own and figure stuff out for themselves without leaning on the teacher all the time. Struggle and mistakes are essential for the formation of new neural pathways necessary for learning. One thing that I’ve found is that when I removed myself, the students helped each other, with the more advanced students taking the lead. Students taking ownership of their learning is a good thing.

Think Differently

One more thing. Teaching literacy requires outside the box thinking. Take your experience of other levels, your training, and what you think you know, and put all of it aside. I went through a comprehensive teacher training program at Conestoga College, and I taught in colleges and universities for a long time. None of that prepared me for a literacy class. None of it.

The best way to learn how to teach literacy is to just do it. The four principles I outlined above can help set you and your students up for effective teaching and learning. But at the end of the day, you learn to ride a bike by riding it.

Derek Czajkowski

Derek teaches at St. Louis Adult Learning and Continuing Education Centre in Kitchener, Ontario. He taught at colleges and universities in the Sultanate of Oman for eighteen years. He holds a B.A. in English Literature from Trent University, and a TESL Certificate from Conestoga College. Derek is also a playwright, fiction writer, an avid walker, jogger, and a Kitchener Rangers fan.