Literacy

My definition of literacy is that it has many aspects to it such as reading, writing, speaking, listening, communicating, and the understanding of ones language. It involves integrating all of these skills and thinking critically to become a literate person. Also, literacy skills provide one with the ability to participate in society.
Some significant points that were brought up in the discussion that helped me further define my definition of literacy are: literacy is the building block of life; literacy is the ability to carry out functions such as questioning, reflecting, finding deeper meaning, connecting, and critiquing to help with ones reading, writing and using these functions in the outside world. Also, from writing my own definition and the discussion, I realized it is really hard to pinpoint a definition of literacy. This is because it is an ever changing field and we learn more about literacy from new experiences and research. Each situation requires a different set of skills or functions needed for certain persons to be considered literate. For example: an adult who reads and writes at a 2nd grade level can still fully function in society by listening, speaking, communicating, questioning, reflecting, making connections a so forth.
The Cambourne article discussed ways to intrigue students to learn about literacy, become excited about learning literacy and getting a lot of out learning literacy. I think that my ideal literacy learning environment would look similar to “The Conditions of Learning” as discussed in the Cambourne article. Such as: immerse students, demonstrate, engage, have expectations, give responsibility, approximations, employment, and response. I believe that all of these conditions are crucial to having an efficient literacy learning environment, where students will succeed in a friendly environment without pressure, become more involved and eager to learn. In my classroom I would also include a wide variety of books, varying from reading levels to books that cover all major types of books from historical fiction, to science fiction, to critical books and more. This will allow my students to be able to expand their horizons of books. To cover all the aspects of literacy, I will have literacy workshops and centers that will focus on students reading, writing, listening, interacting skills as well as many others to make it less repetitive and more comfortable through games and working with their peers.