Diversity Literature Review
Teaching children reading skills in a diverse setting is very important. Many teachers have not learned the necessary methods for teaching culturally diverse students. The following articles include reasons why it is important to learn how to teach students in a multicultural setting, and ways that teachers can accomplish this. "Multimedia Shared Stories," was written by Christopher J. Rivera in 2013. Rivera tells the story of a girl named Alba, a Mexican-American kindergarten student. Alba was struggling in school because she came from a culture that spoke mainly Spanish. Her culture was not being brought up in the classroom, which her teacher felt was causing her to have problems keeping up with the other
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Their needs are different than the typical student. Multimedia shared stories are interactive tools that can be easily customized. Many children who have English as their second language feel that the things that are learning about do not relate to them. It is important to try to make the lessons as relevant to their lives as possible. If the lesson includes images and text that they are familiar with in their culture, they will be more likely to want to learn from that lesson. Creating an MSS can help the lesson become more relatable and appealing to the students (Rivera, 2013). There are many good strategies for using MSS to help students. They will find that they are better able to understand the concepts, because it uses things that are familiar to their culture. Another good thing about the use of MSS in the classroom is that they are very versatile. While they can be used for teaching individual students, they can just as easily be used for teaching the entire class (Rivera, …show more content…
They were using reading strategies through a culturally responsive framework to measure the synergistic effects. They also wanted to determine whether adding multicultural literature and cooperative learning would benefit the students (Bui & Fang, 2013). Through the research, there were two major findings.
On average, the students from both groups made significant gains from pretest to posttest for word recognition, reading comprehension, and story retell. The use of pre-reading strategies gave the students the chance to use contextual cues. The students were required to reread the text on their own. Doing this may have increased their reading fluency. These findings may help teachers in deciding what to include in their lessons.
Bui and Fang discussed how it is important for teachers to assess whether the students have an accurate and appropriate amount of prior knowledge for the lesson. Some students do not have any background knowledge on the topic, which can lead them to fall behind their peers academically. Teachers need to consider the fact that their students are from many different backgrounds, and they have all grown up very differently. This can affect their performance in school so it is necessary to consider how to help those students excel. There are several recommendations on how to do this that come from the
Robles de Melendez, W. (2010). Teaching Young Children in Multicultural Classrooms: Issues, Concepts, and Strategies (3rd ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.
The purpose of this study is to figure out which ways experienced teachers work best with culturally and linguistically diverse students. This study illustrates which strategies experienced teachers have found to work best. The diversity in school in the United States has increased each year. This means that there are an increasing amount of students who are learning English, English language learners (ELLs). This article comes from the perspective that each child should be taught to their specific needs. All students deserve a fair chance to learn. Fair means that every student is treated differently, not equally. Every student learns differently. In order to give every student a fair chance at learning, you must teach them according to their needs. An experienced teacher, Tiffany, describes her experiences working with culturally and linguistically diverse students. This study watches her methods and discusses what works based on data analysis of the success of her students.
For teachers to be effective in providing equitable learning opportunities, they must be informed about the dynamics of diversity in the student population. This awareness should be aimed at providing meaningful and engaging learning activities that are sensitive to the linguistic, gender-based racial, ethnic, cultural, and exceptional needs of the students (Indiana University Teaching Handbook, 2012). However, before teachers can create meaningful opportunities for learning, they must be aware of their students’ strength and weaknesses. Diagnostic assessments provide detailed information that can help the teacher identify areas of weaknesses in order to help students evolve through the reading stages. After identifying students’ deficiencies
Literacy is the act of conveying, analysing and understanding messages to make meaning of interactions. Therefore, literacy can be defined as a multifaceted, continually evolving multimodal process using numerous semiotic systems for communication purposes. A literate individual is required to make sense of information received in order to articulate or express an appropriate response; although, literacy strengths will vary depending on the context or social situation. In an increasingly multicultural and technologically "savvy" classroom, the teaching and learning of multiliteracies is of particular importance as it ensures students gain the skills needed to successfully communicate in a modern world. Therefore, it is necessary for literacy to be described as multimodal, which includes the use of aural, gestural, linguistic, spatial, and visual modes with a purpose to send and receive information. The term multimodal also incorporates the use of art, digita...
Overall, teachers need to take into account all six critical areas of reading when teaching. No matter the subject or time constraints, teachers need to incorporate all areas into the curriculum. Reading is a complex process. If a student does not know to read, a student will never to be able to achieve their best. When using all six areas teachers are using a balanced literacy approach and create greater success for students to succeed in reading and writing.
The Digital Literacy Narrative allowed the author a chance to explain a story through reading with personal visual aid. The story that I choose was from my childhood and expands into my adulthood with my own daughter Madilyn May Sposkoski. The audience that I wanted to speak to were my classmates, Professora Fox and the people that would later read my story in an archive or hopefully the “Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives” (The Ohio State University of Libraries , 2016). The tone that is carried in my writings is sometimes snarky, witty and academic. Documents that are presented to an audience should be sound and complete. I chose to present my Digital Literacy Narrative in the Portable Document Format (PDF) because nothing can be deleted or edited distracting the reader. The ultimate goal of my story is to display a
It highlights the importance of student differences, but teachers need to be able to cater to these differences. Students need to realise that their cultural language is not something that should be referred to as ‘wrong’, but instead embraced and be taught alongside the standard English. There is no use emphasising a certain cultural English in a different culture, as it will not help the student further themselves in that culture but instead help them understand the importance of both. Teachers need to be creating new pedagogies that meet the wants and needs of the students while accommodating to their differences. This can include incorporating more multi-model activities into lessons and combining them with traditional literacy to expand the student’s knowledge. It can also be helpful for teachers to relate language and literacy to the real world and students’ lives. Although this may already be done through Englishes and language variation at home, teachers can discuss with their students in class and help them understand how these differences occur and why they are important. Students need to know that their differences are not something to be ashamed of but instead embraced and can contribute to bringing different perspectives and ideas to the classroom. With technology becoming a major part of today’s society it’s important that it gets incorporated into lessons. Teachers
As a teacher, you need to encourage all attempts at reading, writing, speaking, and allowing children to experience the different functions and use of literacy activity (The Access Center, n.d.). Moreover, it is crucial for educators to understand phonological awareness and phonics; know what constitutes good children’s literature and how to use it; know children who need additional assistance with beginning reading and writing (Cunningham et al, 2004 as cited in McLachlan et al, 2013, p. 112). Educators also need to plan effective activities to assist children experience reading aloud, listening to other children read aloud, listening to tape recordings, and videotapes so children have opportunities to integrate and extend their literacy knowledge (The Access Center, n.d.). Morrow (1990 as cited in The Access Center, n.d.) notes that classroom with greater teacher facilitation promote literacy behaviours, so it is educators’ role to provide literacy rich
Throughout this course, my beliefs have been reaffirmed regarding the literacy needs of culturally and linguistically diverse learners in a few ways. First, I have been implementing sheltered instruction observation protocol in my classroom. “Sheltered instruction teachers use the regular core curriculum and modify their teaching to make the content understandable for ELLs while at the same time promoting their English language development” (Echevarria, Short & Powers, 2008, pg. 42). The sheltered instruction I have been using in my classroom includes slow and clear speech, scaffolded instruction, visual representations, connecting prior knowledge to learned knowledge, cooperative learning, and targeted vocabulary development (Echevarria, Short & Powers, 2008). This course has reaffirmed the importance of using sheltered instruction to support the needs of the diverse
Diversity in classrooms can open student’s minds to all the world has to offer. At times diversity and understanding of culture, deviant experiences and perspectives can be difficult to fulfill, but with appropriate strategies and resources, it can lead students to gain a high level of respect for those unlike them, preferably from a judgmental and prejudiced view. Diversity has a broad range of spectrums. Students from all across the continent; students from political refugees, indigenous Americans, and immigrants bring their cultural and linguistic skills to American classrooms. Students not only bring their cultural and linguistic skills, but they bring their ethnicity, talents, and skills.
Literacy is an on-going skill that teachers and students alike should commonly study and practice in all grades. Problems faced by teachers, especially teachers in higher grades, are not having the skills to be effective teachers of literacy. To effectively teach literacy across content areas, a teacher would need skills such as knowledge of the reading process and the ability to cultivate the knowledge gained in order to make informed decisions within their classrooms (Clary, Oglan, Styslinger,
The world is currently undergoing a cultural change, and we live in an increasingly diverse society. This change is not only affect the people in the community but also affect the way education is viewed. Teaching diversity in the classroom and focusing multicultural activities in the programs can help improve positive social behavior in children. There is no question that the education must be prepared to embrace the diversity and to teach an increasingly diverse population of young children.
In this information–driven age, preparing students to read a variety of texts with complete understanding should likely be one of our educational system’s highest priorities. Understanding is more than just the ability to produce information on demand (knowledge) or the ability to perform learned routines (skills). “Understanding is the ability to think and act flexibly with what one knows.” (Active Learning Practice for Schools, n. d.) A review of the literature in the area of reading comprehension of elementary-age students shows two principle areas of focus. There is a body of literature that examines the development of proficient vs. struggling comprehenders and another body of literature that compares methodologies for teaching reading comprehension.
In conducting her research, the author understood that she needed to describe key issues of culturally diverse students, recommend a curriculum approach to address the issues, and discuss the challenges and benefits expected. In reading Cultural and Linguistic Diversity: Issues in Education (2010), s...
Many students have a hard time when it comes to reading. There are many reading inventions that can help students out. Reading inventions are strategies that help students who are having trouble reading. The interventions are techniques that can be used to assist in one on ones with students or working in small groups to help students become a better reader. Hannah is a student who seems to be struggling with many independent reading assignments. There can be many reasons that Hannah is struggling with the independent reading assignments. One of the reasons that Hannah can be struggling with is reading comprehension while she is reading on her on. Reading comprehension is when students are able to read something, they are able to process it and they are able to understand what the text is saying. According to article Evidence-based early reading practices within a response to intervention system, it was mentioned that research strategies that can use to help reading comprehension can include of activating the student’s background knowledge of the text, the teacher can have questions that the student answer while reading the text, having students draw conclusions from the text, having