Socioeconomic Factors & Literacy Learning

As we have already established in previous installments of this blog, students living in poverty have many hurdles they must overcome in order to become successful readers and writers. As teachers and literacy leaders we believe it is our responsibility to advocate for this population of marginalized students. One way we can accomplish this includes sharing what we know about research based literacy strategies that have been found to be effective in improving literacy outcomes for students living in poverty.  Increasing engagement is one way to improve literacy outcomes for students in this population. Providing students with autonomy support, using mixed ability reading groups, building self-efficacy, using explicit instruction, and peer learning have all been shown to increase student engagement (Kennedy, 2018). Below you will find  5 literacy strategies that incorporate one or more of these elements.  Strategy #1 This strategy has been included because of its utilizati...

This blog was created to provide teachers with appropriate teaching strategies they can use in their classrooms, these activities are based on evidence and research.  These literacy strategies can help learners in poverty gain extra practice in skills necessary for becoming fluent readers.  Many learners in poverty deal with situations that are out of their control and it is our job as educators to figure out what these students need in order to fill the gaps they have missed. Figuring out how to support learners from different backgrounds and populations takes time and should be carefully planned out. The article written by Rasinski (2017) stated that since the year 2000,with the publication of the report of the National Reading Panel (NRP), phonemic awareness, phonics or word decoding, reading fluency (automaticity in word recognition and expressive reading), and text and word comprehension have been repeatedly cited as essential to student success in learning to read. ( p.5...