Teaching Literacy Notes

Two sets of notes compiled by Prof. Dr. Habib Ahmed for self-study in the Teaching Literacy course, taken by B.Ed. (Hons) 4 Year students in their 3rd semester. Both follow the course’s three units: what reading and writing are; growing up to read and write, in the early years; and becoming readers and writers in classes 1 to 3.

Teaching Literacy Skills opens with the course outcomes and works through each unit in prose — literacy, skilled reading and skilled writing; the components of reading and the sub-systems of language; learning to read and write in a multilingual context, the home–school connection, and the stages of second-language acquisition and of reading, spelling and writing development; phonological awareness, the alphabetic principle, word recognition and the literacy-rich, print-rich classroom; and strategies for fluency, vocabulary and comprehension, matching texts to students, guided reading, and writing as a window into reading.

Short Question Answers goes over the same ground as 200 short questions, each with a brief answer, for revision — from “What is reading?” to how teachers can bring writing into reading instruction.