Literacy Professional Learning Resource – Teaching Strategies

Literacy to Learn: Getting students knowledge ready for literacy learning

Literacy to Learn 5 - Transcript

Voiceover: Petrina has students scan the text they will read about women in ancient Egypt to select unfamiliar words, and then talk about their meanings and suggest synonyms. Note how she asks the class to say what the scan action means first. She then asks the students to suggest reasons for doing the vocabulary activity and the value it is for their learning.

Teacher: Our next step is to scan the text and look for any words that are new to us or that we don’t understand. Before we do that, who can tell me what I mean by ‘scanning the text’?

Student: It means, going over the text and just checking for words that you might not know or unfamiliar words, but not reading the whole thing.

Teacher: What does that do for us, before we start reading?

Student: It gives us a clue of what we’re going to do when we look at ancient Egypt, such as Cleopatra and the words, so when we are up to doing it, we know what we’re going to read, and it might get us more interested in it.

Teacher: Very good. So it helps us get more interested, and it gives us clues about what we’re reading.

Student: We get a better understanding of what we’re reading.

Teacher: Yes we do. Because as we’re reading along we already know some of the words that are in the text. So that helps.