Literacy
Literacy involves the knowledge and skills we need to access, understand, analyse, and evaluate information, make meaning, express thoughts, present ideas and opinions, interact with others, and participate in everyday activities.
Literacy involves listening to, reading, viewing, speaking, writing, and creating oral, print, visual, and digital texts, and using and modifying language for different purposes in a range of contexts.
The “Keys” To Reading
The Simple View of Reading is that learning to read requires two abilities:
- Decoding – correctly identifying words
- Comprehension – understanding the meaning of words
In order to build these two abilities, we first need to develop the following:
- Phonemic awareness – identifying and manipulating individual sounds in spoken words
- Phonics – decoding words using knowledge of letter-sound relationships
- Fluency – reading with speed and accuracy
- Vocabulary – knowing the meaning of a variety of words and the structure of written language
- Comprehension – understanding the meaning and purpose of the text
- Morphological awareness – knowing the meaning of words in their smallest form and how they change when making compound words or using suffixes and prefixes
- Oral language – the foundation for literacy skills, encompassing receptive and expressive language.
