|
Balanced Literacy: An Overview
What is Balanced Literacy?
Balanced literacy is an approach for teaching literacy that is widely used in classrooms across the country. It involves several methods of teaching and learning reading and writing, whole class instruction directed by the teacher with independent work in reading, writing, and oral language. By integrating a variety of approaches, a balance is achieved in which students learning to understand text (from a whole language approach) as well as how to read text (from a phonics approach).
Overview of the Major Components:
Read Aloud
To help foster a love for reading and expose students to texts that they might not become familiar with ordinarily, balanced literacy includes an important read-aloud component. Teachers read to students, normally in a full class format, from texts that they would not be able to read on their own. Reading aloud also puts language in context, reflecting “research (that) demonstrates that skills taught, practiced, and tested in isolation are not used as consistently or effectively as skills taught when children are actually reading and writing” (www.earlyliterature.ecsd.net/balanced% 20literacy.htm).
Shared Reading
To help readers learn new words, teachers read along with students in shared reading. In these lessons, students read familiar, predictable books along with the teacher. This not only teaches students the reading process, it also provides a time for teachers to teach phonics skills in context, to make them more meaningful and more likely to be mastered.
Guided Reading
Continuing with the idea of learning in context, teachers conduct guided reading sessions in which they work with small homogeneous groups of students. Students read on their level, while the teacher is there to reinforce skills and guide the group through questioning and discussion of the text. Since the teacher is working with a small number of students, he or she can also use this opportunity to assess individual students’ reading strategies and to provide mentoring on specific skills.
Independent Reading
Finally, students engage in independent reading, a component of the balanced literacy process that reinforces skills that have been addressed through guided and shared reading, while allowing students to read on a level comfortable for them. Independent reading also helps to foster a love for reading, as students choose their own texts and have a chance to deepen comprehension and work on fluency. Teachers who give students time to develop close relationships with books show students that reading is a priority.
Another important aspect of a balanced approach to literacy is writing instruction. Research shows that “60% of children can learn to read first from their own writing” (http://www.cherylsigmon.com/about.asp). Learning to write goes hand-in-hand with learning to read. In a balanced literacy classroom, writing is taught much in the same way as reading, with four components necessary to thoroughly tackle the writing process.
Write Aloud
Writing is modeled for students by teachers in write-aloud or modeled writing time.
Shared Writing
Working collaboratively, teachers and students compose written accounts in a shared writing session, so that strategies can be modeled and explained and specific writing skills can be introduced.
Guided Writing
In guided writing, students creating their own writing, with the teacher as guide. Activities associated with guided writing take place in small homogenous groups of students. Teachers serve as mentors as students go through the process.
Independent Writing
Integral to the process is independent writing, which provides students with the consistent opportunity to apply and practice the skills already introduced and to cultivate their love of and comfort with writing on their own level.
Working with Words: Phonics Instruction
In conjunction with teaching literacy through a balanced approach, some districts choose to give extra attention to phonics instruction in the younger grades to reinforce the skills taught in context. The Four Blocks Model for teaching reading, a popular balanced approach for literacy instruction, has a block called Working with Words (see http://www.four-blocks.com/index.htm for more explanation). Using this approach, students are taught how to attack high frequency words and analyze patterns and sounds to help them decode and construct words on their own.
The word wall is an important part of “working with words.” By displaying high frequency words where they can always be seen in the classroom, the wall aims to assist students in developing a sight vocabulary. Teachers choose “three to five new words per week on the basis of diagnostic information such as observing words that students misspell in journals, being aware of words that children often ask how to spell, or noticing words that are frequently used in their new books for guided reading” (Kaufman, 2002, p. 723). Since many words do not fall into traditional spelling patterns, some words are necessary for students to know by sight alone, and displaying them alphabetically helps students with recall while emphasizing the idea of first letter sounds as well.
|
