I’ve been involved for the past 9 months or so in quite a lot of stuff to do with literacy. It began with a Language and Literacy course, funded with ESL (English as a Second Language) money, dealing with Functional Literacy. Surprisingly, I really enjoyed the course, and was involved in presenting the results of the unit of work I designed as a part of this program to other teachers of ESL. I was part of a team that did the course, and two other teachers and I did the presentation.
At this session, a couple of mentions were made of Stephen Graham, an apparently well-known expert of literacy issues. He is in Adelaide at the moment, and today I attended a workshop run by him, dealing with literacy in the Middle and Senior Years. That is, High School.
Steven used to be a Primary School Principal, but has worked for several years with a publishing company and University research team on literacy in Australia, and overseas. Apparently, Australian children are the second-most literate in the world, behind only Finland. We have around 93% literacy, compared to around 55% in the USA.
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