Making Secondary Literacy Accessible for All: Review and Critique

The article "Making Secondary Literacy Accessible for All" by Christy Palmquist and Heather Prenevost focuses on how we can meet the literacy needs of ALL students with the help of supports and technology, especially those who are struggling to become independent readers.  I found this article to be a straightforward read that offered some practical strategies that we can take away and use in our classrooms.

We need to focus on the five pillars of reading (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension) along with both expressive and receptive language skills to develop a balanced literacy program so that students may move to higher order thinking skills.  The authors state that language skills, both expressive and receptive, are the base of all academic learning and that "for our students to learn subject matter, strategies and higher order thinking skills, they must develop their language skills." 

As educators, we need to ask ourselves, "What needs do my students have in literacy?" Once we have assessed their literacy and language skills, we need to match the students' needs with the right supports and assistive technology to help develop the strategies required to move into higher order thinking skills.    We must do this by keeping in mind that all students learn in different ways.  Using the right technology will help maximize learning while using ineffective technology will have an adverse effect resulting in little or no growth in language and literacy skills.  We also have to be mindful of how much support we provide as our goal is for our students to become independent learners.  If we offer too much help, students remain dependent learners, and if we do not provide enough support, the student may become frustrated and "shut down."

I like how the authors provide us with some tools and practical strategies that we can implement with our students across all grade levels.  We use these tools of visualizing and verbalizing, think reading, vocabulary and comprehension and reading to enhance language skills and thus higher level thinking. 

The "Thinking Reading" strategy is one that I have used frequently in my classroom with my guided reading groups, although the authors go a little more in-depth than I have.  I like the CAR – Comment, Ask, Respond approach.    I also like the images/visuals that were included in the article.  Those are something that could be easily reproduced and used in the classroom.