What does literacy mean to us?
Our aim in creating these materials is to foster literacy development. We understand literacy to be “the process of using reading, writing, and oral language to extract, construct, integrate, and critique meaning through interaction and involvement with multimodal texts” (Frankel et al., p. 7, 2016).
Literacy development involves the development of a number of low-level and high-level skills (e.g., answering a fact-based question, making inferences, or integrating information from two different sources).
Of course, literacy skills depend on language skills (e.g., functional language, vocabulary, grammar, etc), but our aim in creating these tasks is to foster the development of literacy. By completing literacy activities, students’ language skills will be impacted.
As such, each activity within the task is integral to task completion. We have not developed activities within the task to work grammar, vocabulary or pronunciation. If you wish to include these types of activities, please look at our page on focusing on form for ideas. Briefly, we encourage their inclusion only after the task has been completed and only for items that caused your students some difficulties (reactive focus on form). Including targeted vocabulary and grammar activities, based on students’ needs, is most effective.
Your role as a teacher to maximize learning:
Pay close attention to learner language and interaction!
For each task, you will be able to obtain
- Detailed lesson plan: Teacher information sheet
- All materials for learners which can be printed or uploaded for online instruction
Multilingualism and Literacy Development 