Content Area Literacy KWL + Use With Students

Content Area Literacy:

Know:

Content area literacy is all about the competence with reading, writing, gleaning information, and discussing knowledge within a certain academic discipline. As an English teacher, being literate in my content area might mean that a student runs across a vocabulary word he doesn't and has the knowledge and resources at his disposal to look the word up in a dictionary. Or, better yet, has the literacy skills to discern the meaning of the word from contextual clues in the reading.

Want To Know:

Specific strategies to increase literacy in my content area.
Specific ways to evaluate whether or not these strategies are effective.
How knowledge about content area literacy can help me push my students to more abstract levels of thinking.


How to use KWL With Students:

I think KWL would be a great precursor to any new unit of study. I know a few teachers who use pretests extensively in order to know about a student's prior level of knowledge in a subject. This allows the teacher to know how to organize their unit so that they do not cover material the student already knows. The KWL approach would not only give teachers information about prior student knowledge, but it would also let teachers know what students are most interested in learning. Overall, using KWL might be beneficial for both teacher planning and student-driven interest in the subject matter at hand.