Nicholas R. Baker
EDCI 5264 Th 4-6:50
Dr. Azano
Why adolescent literacy? (Why me?) Reflection
Literacy is a concept that has many different definitions in regards to the combination of
literacy and education. Literacy in itself is the notion that a person is able to assimilate and
process broad and sometimes specific and abstract written and spoken information on a basic
functional level. Literacy in education for teachers is essentially the notion that teachers must be
able to adapt and diffuse both written and spoken information to their students in order for the
student to be positively motivated to analyze and use critical literacy skills with course materials.
Positive motivation is the key solution for teachers regarding the development of adequate
literacy skills for their students because it provides the student with the ability to analyze and
adapt the information to their interests and further expands their knowledge and analytical skills
by personal motivation.
Critical literacy is the next evolution or stage and is a key component for literacy within
education. Critical literacy is important because it is essentially the ability to supersede basic
literacy abilities by thinking analytically, to apply the knowledge learned in life to the literature,
and to think beyond the text through abstraction and elaboration. Critical literacy in education
has taken on many different forms in that now there is more course based or disciplinary critical
literary skills needed to succeed in a broad range of subjects. This has changed greatly due to the
combination of basic literacy skills with critical literacy skills within Adolescent literacy.
Adolescent literacy is really the combination of both basic literacy skills and critical
literacy skills. Adolescent literacy is the summation that students develop into critical analytical
thinkers that are personally motivated to learn the material and are able to adapt and assimilate
that knowledge in order to further elaborate and use abstraction to understand what they have
learned. The concept of adolescent literacy has given rise to research into course base or
disciplinary literary skills.
Course based critical literary skills are needed in today’s secondary classrooms. through
disciplinary literacy. Disciplinary literacy has begun to take effect due to the fact that different
disciplines require different literacy skills. For example, social scientists often use various
literary resources from photographs, maps, documents, and textbooks within their discipline.
Literacy within the social sciences encompasses the notion that students are required to look at
facts within the social sciences through a non-biased causality relationship between people,
places, and events. Throughout the various disciplines there are different literacy practices or
techniques to read, write, and to speak.
As a social scientist there needs to be further elaboration and analysis of the causality
relationship between all aspects of life whether or not its history, political science, geography,
economics, or psychology. All of these areas of social science rely on the notion that as a teacher
the teacher presents the information or the facts to the student in order for the student to be
individually motivated to contemplate the material. This process requires interactivity to a
certain extent where the student develops the skills to interact with the material and the teacher
provides the interactivity. Hopefully, if the teacher is successful in relating the material to the
student then that student will be positively motivated to achieve the necessary skills and
knowledge to be an individually motivated well-informed social scientist.
Content area literacy is very important for the classroom. The definition of
literacy has been a very dynamic term over time. Literacy in itself is the notion that a person is
able to assimilate and process broad and sometimes specific and abstract written and spoken
information on a basic functional level. Literacy in education for teachers is essentially the
notion that teachers must be able to adapt and diffuse both written and spoken information to
their students in order for the student to be positively motivated to analyze and use critical
literacy skills with course materials. Positive motivation is the key for teachers regarding the
literacy of their students because it provides the student with the ability to analyze and adapt the
information to their interests and further expands their knowledge and analytical skills. The role
of the teacher is to make sure that a student has the literacy skills to evolve his or her basic
literacy skills into critical literacy skills. Once a student has developed critical literacy skills then
the student will be better able to