Literacy In High School Literacy

Statement of the Problem Reading. It is something that one does every day, and with modern technology much more often than generations before. Instead of having a conversation over coffee with an old friend, one can now go to Facebook and catch up within seconds. This personal relationship with words is not new to humankind, but it is under a revolution. Today, being illiterate cuts one off from so much more than the academic word. If one is not only a reader, but a strong reader and writer, they can obtain middle class dreams.
The importance of literacy is every growing, and many schools in the state of Wisconsin have made “reading,” “writing,” or “vocabulary” their Student Learning Objective (SLO) focus under Educator Effectiveness (EE);

However, it is becoming an area of interest. Sissi Carroll speculates, “Today, educators recognize that adolescents experiment with literacies in school, home, community setting, among friends, family member, even strangers. We know that what adolescents learn in their English language art classrooms needs to be applicable and transferable to home and community settings” (2009, 94). The idea that students need to take content and skills covered in a high school classroom and apply it to their daily lives seems like something new. However, elementary students always are expected to take what they read and learn and apply it to life. The out-of-school literacy demand that adolescents develop the ability to use what O’Brien (2006) refers to as “multimediating” which means they can “move seamlessly in and out of the real world and virtual words, rapidly and automatically using various technologies that they embrace as extensions of themselves” (36). The concept that physical, concrete objects of literacy needs to flow seamlessly into a virtual world is new to the academic field. While it should be taught in all classrooms, the ELA seems to bear the brunt of the instructional