workforce
campusreview.com.au
Learning literacy
Universities are crucial to improving the
literacy of pre-service teachers.
By Janet Fellowes
I
t is very difficult to dispute the need for teachers to possess
sound literacy skills. Communication and literacy are central
to teaching success, and personal literacy competency is
an obvious prerequisite for much of a teacher’s work. Not only
do teachers need to teach children to read and comprehend
texts, and to convey meaning in clear, interesting sentences
with accurate punctuation and spelling, but they need
personal literacy for many other tasks, including designing
and administering classroom assessments, writing comments
on students’ work and term reports, and crafting letters and
notes to parents.
Accordingly, it makes sense to be concerned about the literacy
levels of graduating teachers and to desire that those embarking on
teaching careers have what is obviously a fundamental prerequisite
for performing the job.
Universities have a responsibility to ensure all teacher education
students graduate with personal literacy competency as well
as with other essential competencies, such as numeracy and
information and communication technology.
When students are accepted into teacher education courses,
whether via their ATAR scores or other means, their personal
literacy skills should become a significant focus and remain so for
the duration of their course.
While there is much being done in universities and much that has
been achieved, universities must continue to evaluate, refine and
add to their practices with the aim of graduating all their students
with proven personal literacy excellence. Further consideration
might be given to:
• I nstituting on-entry personal literacy assessments to be
completed by students in the first semester of their teacher
education course; these can be used to determine the precise
gaps in their personal literacy and numeracy skills and identify
their support needs
• Providing different personal literacy learning pathways for pre-
service teachers so as to differentiate the experiences and the
amount and type of support provided for pre-service teachers’
personal literacy growth
• E stablishing precise short-term and long-term goals that
guide the teaching and measurement of pre-service teachers’
personal literacy
• U
sing carefully selected commercial programs and
online resources to support pre-service teachers’ personal
literacy growth
• Ensuring that high-level professional literacy standards and
personal literacy learning goals and experiences are rigorously
addressed in all units of teacher education courses
• Embedding professional literacy learning goals and
experiences in all units of teaching within teacher
education courses
• Ensuring pre-service teachers can articulate the specific
skills and competencies that comprise personal literacy
excellence and understand the relationship between their literacy
competencies and the teaching and school contexts in which
they are used
• Providing pre-service teachers with opportunities for
self-reflection about their personal literacy learning, perhaps
by asking them to write personal journals
• E nsuring that authentic assessments are used to monitor pre-
service teachers’ literacy growth and to determine their overall
professional literacy competency
• Providing pre-service teachers with opportunities for practical
literacy use in a range of teaching situations. ■
Janet Fellowes is a senior lecturer in the School of Education at
Edith Cowan University, and the author of Language, Literacy
and Early Childhood Education (Oxford University Press).
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