Abstract:

An instructional instrument was revised by this instructor who taught a Literacy course. This instrument contained critical thinking questions and activity exercises based on the course text. The instrument created an environment where student reading, writing, speaking, listening, and cognition skills were interactively applied to help improve academic proficiencies.

An overhead projector will show a two-sided instructional instrument: one side entitled “concept search review” and the other entitled “activity journal.” The sections on each side contains teacher formulated questions based on the academic content of the class text. The “concept” side has critical thinking questions and the “activity” side requires students to describe, explain, and demonstrate answers to the inquiry-based questions on the academic content of the text.
In my undergraduate Literacy course, each student group selected a topic of interest and wrote an answer on both sides of the instrument which included the “concept” section and in the “activity” section. The “activity” section was linked to the theory questions posed on the concept page. The “concept” and “activity” questions were based on material in the text that was simplified by the instructor into terms which enabled students to better understand the meaning of the complex content. All group representatives were either chosen by peers or the instructor and wrote the groups’ responses on the board. The student presenters explained and defended their written answers while the instructor acted as a facilitator to encourage student-teacher interaction.
In this course, fourteen out of twenty-four students had either taken ESL or bilingual classes. According to this instructor’s viewpoint, this environment enabled students to interactively apply their reading, writing, speaking, listening, and cognitive skills helping them improve their academic proficiencies. In addition, students were more focused on their tasks and cooperatively interacted with one another. Therefore, these teaching approaches may be useful to other instructors.

Keywords:

Teaching literacy, concept search review.