Page 9 - English OLC Literacy Course 12 (2003)

INTRODUCTION 7
Reading is an active process of thinking and constructing meaning from texts. Competent readers use strategies before they read, to preview the text and to activate their prior knowledge of the topic; while they read, to track and record ideas and monitor comprehension; and after they read, to consolidate and extend understanding. Competent readers know that reading plays a vital role in learning, opening the door to knowledge about themselves, others, and the world.
The Reading strand of the OSSLC is designed to help struggling readers to learn and use effective strategies to understand a range of texts. It requires students to read and respond to a variety of informational texts (e.g., opinion pieces, information paragraphs, textbooks), narra- tive texts (e.g., newspaper reports, magazine stories, short fiction), and graphic texts (e.g., tables, line graphs and bar graphs, schedules). Students will have numerous opportunities to learn appropriate reading strategies and use them to understand directly and indirectly stated ideas and information in texts, and to make connections between personal knowledge or experi- ence and the ideas and information in texts. As in the OSSLT, the emphasis in the course is on informational texts; however, students will also engage in independent reading for personal, school, and career-related purposes, thus going beyond the requirements of the OSSLT.
Building Writing Skills
Students need to be able to write competently for a variety of school and other real-life purposes. The competent writer, as defined by the OSSLT criteria, states and supports main ideas, organizes writing clearly and coherently, and uses the conventions of standard Canadian English.
A variety of research in the field of writing reveals that the quality of student writing is greatly enhanced when students use the writing process in their writing tasks. Unlike the OSSLT (which specifies the topics students write about and the forms of writing they produce, and sets limits on the time allowed for writing), this course gives students regular, ongoing experi- ence in using the writing process to produce and craft their writing, and allows them to choose some of their own topics and writing forms to suit their own purposes.
To help students develop into competent writers, the Writing strand of the OSSLC requires them to produce a variety of forms of writing for school and other real-life purposes, includ- ing summaries, information paragraphs, opinion pieces (series of paragraphs expressing an opinion), and news reports. Students will use the writing process and their knowledge of the conventions of text forms to organize ideas for writing, to develop main ideas and provide supporting details, to match tone and language to purpose and audience, and to use grammar, punctuation, and spelling correctly.
Understanding and Assessing Growth in Literacy
This strand requires students to assess their growth in literacy. Students will set learning goals, monitor their improvement in literacy throughout the course, and confer with their teacher about their progress at regular intervals. Students will also maintain and manage a literacy portfolio containing their reading responses, pieces of writing, and a learning journal in which they record their goal-setting and self-monitoring activities during the course. Students will review this portfolio, both during the course and at its end, in order to assess their growth in literacy.