Putting a pluriliteracies approach into practice

In cooperation with Ana Halbach and Do Coyle

A. Introduction

A pluriliteracies approach to teaching for learning (PTL) puts subject literacy development in more than one language at the core of learning because we believe subject literacies are the key to deep learning and the development of transferable skills.

This approach focuses on helping learners become literate in content subjects or topics and to empower them to successfully and appropriately communicate that knowledge across cultures and languages.

A pluriliteracies approach provides teachers with the tools to help their learners acquire increasingly deep subject knowledge which consists of

• • facts

• • concepts

• • procedures

However, knowledge alone is not enough to make progress in a subject or discipline. Learners also need to be taught the subject-specific strategies, to solve the increasingly complex tasks typical of each subject and to learn how to develop the skills that will enable them to do so.

A pluriliteracies approach acknowledges that learning a subject is about so much more than “simply” learning content. It is based on the idea that education is a developmental activity. Therefore learning a subject is not about reciting facts but about learners deepening their conceptual understanding which may eventually lead to the development of transferable skills and to new ways of thinking.

We know now that language is the key to developing and increasing conceptual understanding. It is this focus on language that will ultimately lead to deeper learning which can be defined as the ability to take what was learned in one situation and apply it to another situation. Through deeper learning (which often involves shared learning and interactions with others in a learning community), learners develop expertise in a particular subject and master its unique ways of creating and sharing knowledge.

Helping our students become pluriliterate (= acquiring subject literacy in more than one language) will empower them to construct and communicate knowledge purposefully and successfully across languages and cultures and prepare them for living and working in the “knowledge age”.

B. So what’s new?

In line with recent educational thinking we revisit concepts that are regularly used, bring them together and in so doing, renew our understanding of them.

Principles of Pluriliteracies Teaching for Learning (PTL)

Literacies development doesn’t just happen, but needs to be planned for and consciously fostered in the content subject lessons. In order to do so, five fundamental principles have to be taken into account.

1. Conceptualizing learning progression

In order to help our learners make progress along the knowledge path into a subject, teachers need to have a clear understanding about the individual ingredients of progress, how they are interrelated and how they can be made accessible for learning.

The idea that learners of all age groups can participate in all the ways of working and creating knowledge in a subject (doing, organizing, explaining, arguing) at an age-appropriate level is one of our model’s most central points.

In the same way that students of any age are able to participate in all forms of working in the content subject at different levels of complexity, the language they use will also vary in terms of sophistication. This is illustrated in the Lego analogy: cognitive discourse functions and genres interact at different levels in the process of constructing and communicating knowledge. It shows that, as thinking develops through experience and practice, from the concrete to the abstract, learners are able to process content at an increasingly complex level and communicate their understanding through increasingly sophisticated text types and genres.

Compared to a novice, a more advanced student should:

• * know more facts about any given topic;

• * have a deeper conceptual understanding of the specific subject content;

• * have a better command of subject specific procedures/skills and strategies;

Since learning cannot be separated from language, learner progress must be expressed through an individual’s ability to communicate knowledge and demonstrate understanding by being able to:

• * extract information from increasingly complex texts in all relevant modes;

• * use more genres and genre moves (= subparts of a genre);

• * express a deeper understanding of relevant concepts within those moves;

• * communicate his/her understanding in...