Stephanie’s handout – Active Literacy
The book is the greatest interactive medium of all time. You can underline t, Write in the Margins, fold down a page, and skip ahead. And you can take it anywhere.
Michael Lynton
The Components of Active Literacy
Reading, writing, talking, listening and investigating to engage in the world of issues and ideas, to enhance understanding and to expand thinking.
Talking and listening to each other
· Having a conversation – “literacy floats on a sea of talk.”
· Sharing thinking and learning with others
· Discussing, agreeing, disagreeing, debating
Reading to construct meaning
· Noticing the inner conversation
· Activating background knowledge and noticing new learning
· Asking authentic questions
· Inferring to surface big ideas and themes
· Determining importance and synthesizing information
Responding to reading by talking
· Connecting personal experience and ideas to the text
· Wondering and thinking inferentially
· Creating a common language for talking about what we read and what we think
Responding to reading through writing and drawing
· Writing and drawing to merge our thinking with the information
· Making thinking visible
· Surfacing big ideas and themes
Writing and drawing to discover and explore thinking
· Learning information, building new knowledge and organizing it
· Expanding thinking and ideas via inference and interpretation
· Creating original ways to represent learning
Investigating and doing further research
· Exploring topics of our own choosing; gathering information
· Asking and answering significant questions
· Summarizing and synthesizing information
· Sharing learning to bring it to life
Harvey and Goudvis 2006
