Local Literacies: Theory and Practice
While many books have been written about basic literacy, few offer detailed information on how to plan and carry out a community literacy project. Fewer still give guidance in tackling the additional barriers of language, culture, and logistics in developing countries and in treating the local community as an active partner rather than a passive recipient in the literacy process. In Local Literacies: Theory and Practice, Glenys Waters includes these elements and presents a practical guide for developing a literacy program.
Beginning with a discussion of the theories of learning and reading, the author provides a detailed description of how to plan and organize a literacy program when the practitioner has little to go on but wit, knowledge, and determination. With approximately one half of the book given to the development of instructional methods and materials in reading, writing, and basic math, Local Literacies will be especially helpul to those doing literacy work in linguistically diverse settings in much of the developing world.The reader will quickly discover that this is a book written by a person who has “been there and done that.” Waters has spent more than twenty years in Australia and Papua New Guinea, both as a practitioner and a consultant in programs of literacy for adults and children. This personal experience, plus a thorough knowledge of the professional literature, makes Local Literacies a “must” for the pioneering literacy worker.
This book is also available in the LinguaLinks Library 5.0 software along with other Literacy resources.
Preface
Acknowledgements
- How Learning Takes Place
- The Learning Context
- Planning a Literacy Programme
- Reading
- Reading Readiness
- Principles of Primer Construction
- Phonics, Syllable, Word, and Sentence Approaches
- Whole Language Approaches
- Integrated Approaches
- Assessment of a Literacy Programme
- Materials Production
- Teaching Writing
- Mathematics
13.1 School mathematics versus “real” mathematics
13.2 Working with numbers
13.3 Telling the time
13.4 Practice problems using money - What Is Literacy?
1.1 How children learn
1.2 Informal learning styles
1.3 Formal learning styles
1.4 Encouraging purposeful learning
1.5 Helping students construct meanings effectively
1.6 Two case studies on learning
1.7 Strategies for building a good learning environment
2.1 The learner
2.2 The facilitator or teacher
2.3 The context
2.4 The learning task
3.1 Determining the needs
3.2 Designing a literacy programme: Some factors to consider
3.3 A typical programme
3.4 Literacy for adults
3.5 Literacy for children
3.6 Literacy for youth
3.7 Transfer materials
4.1 The reading debate
4.2 Ways of teaching reading
4.3 What is reading?
4.4 How do people learn to read?
5.1 Reading readiness activities
5.2 A skills-based approach to reading readiness
6.1 Look at the sound system of the target language
6.2 Consider principles from reading research and experience
6.3 Choose a method and design a layout
6.4 The primer as part of the reading lesson
6.5 The primer as part of the literacy programme
7.1 Phonics approach
7.2 Syllable approach
7.3 Word and sentence approaches
8.1 What is the whole language approach?
8.2 Shared reading
8.3 Literature-based reading programmes for Papua New Guinea
8.4 Big Books for sharing enjoyable reading experiences
8.5 Whole language approach case studies
8.6 Language experience approach
8.7 Implementing a whole language programme
9.1 Eclectic methods
9.2 Interactive whole language
9.3 Teaching language development using themes
9.4 Samples of activities for primer lessons
10.1 Assessment of programmes
10.2 Assessment of materials
10.3 Assessment of students’ reading
10.4 How to do case studies
10.5 Involving students in assessment
11.1 Writers’ workshops
11.2 Writing good stories
11.3 Materials production workshops
11.4 Puffing books together
12.1 Formation of letters
12.2 The process of writing
12.3 The reading-writing connection
14.1 The many definitions of literacy
14.2 Literacy within the culture
14.3 The literacy system
References
Index