Page 52 - THE ONTARIO CURRICULUM, GRADES 9–12 | Classical Studies and International Languages

THE ONTARIO CURRICULUM, GRADES 9–12 | Classical Studies and International Languages
LITERACY, INQUIRY SKILLS, AND NUMERACY IN CLASSICAL STUDIES AND
INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGES
A vision of literacy for adolescent learners in Ontario schools might be described as follows:
All students are equipped with the literacy skills necessary to be critical and creative thinkers, effective meaning makers and communicators, collaborative co-learners, and innovative problem solvers. These are the skills that will enable them to achieve personal, career, and societal goals.
Students, individually and in collaboration with others, develop skills in three areas, as follows:
• Thinking: Students access, manage, create, and evaluate information as they think imaginatively and critically in order to solve problems and make decisions, including those related to issues of fairness, equity, and social justice.
• Expression: Students use language and images in rich and varied forms as they read, write, listen, speak, view, represent, discuss, and think critically about ideas.
• Reflection: Students apply metacognitive knowledge and skills to monitor their own thinking and learning, and in the process, develop self-advocacy skills, a sense of self-efficacy, and an interest in lifelong learning.
As this vision for adolescent literacy suggests, literacy involves a range of critical thinking skills and is essential for learning across the curriculum. Students need to learn to think, express, and reflect in discipline-specific ways. Teachers support them in this learning by not only addressing the curriculum expectations but also considering, and purposefully teaching students about, the literacy demands of the particular subject area. Literacy, inquiry skills, and numeracy are critical to students’ success in all subjects of the curriculum, and in all areas of their lives.
Many of the activities and tasks that students undertake in the classical studies and international languages curriculum support them in their ability to think, express, and reflect in discipline-specific ways. These include researching, discussing, listening, viewing media, communicating with words and with the body, connecting illustrations and text, role playing to create meaning through stories, and – especially important for kinesthetic learners – communicating through physical activity. Students use language to record their observations, to describe their critical analyses in both informal and formal contexts, and to present their findings in presentations and reports in oral, written, graphic, and multimedia forms. Understanding in classical studies and international languages requires the understanding and use of specialized terminology. Students are required to use appropriate and correct terminology, and are encouraged to use language with care
and precision in order to communicate effectively.
As stated earlier, oral communication skills are fundamental to the development of literacy in classical studies and international languages and are essential for thinking and learning. The expectations in all strands give students a chance to engage in brainstorming, report- ing, and other oral activities to identify what they know about a topic, discuss strategies for solving a problem, present and defend ideas or debate issues, and offer critiques or feedback on work, skill demonstrations, or opinions expressed by their peers.
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