Teaching literacy

A brilliant and truly useful, free web based tool that takes a pieces of text and turns it into a complete lesson. Once you have pasted or typed in your text it takes you through it step by step, giving you the option of creating cloze exercises, vocabulary, grammar and comprehension questions.

Includes a huge, complete reading scheme (Stairway to Reading) aimed at struggling beginner readers (children – but there are no childlike graphics and almost all the resources are very suitable for adults). Includes a complete set of 40 phonic based lesson plans, flashcards, a huge (100+ pages) of related bingo games and a super 124 PDF of reading material ranging from CVC word lists to complex, multi-paragraph texts (up to to Entry 3).

RaPAL produce a bulletin three times a year. Well worth the subscription fee and an excellent source of research, critiques and practical ideas. If you believe that literacy is more than a set of narrow skills (and don’t think that the Adult Literacy Curriculum is the ‘be all and end all’ of literacy teaching) then this is the journal for you. I have been a member since around 2004 and always find it an interesting read.

Fascinating background information on spelling compound words. Numerous other columns include: apostrophes, 5 elements of style, email dos and don’ts, thank you letters.

Some good background info on teaching reading and comprehension strategies. There are also ILT links but note the site has not been updated recently.

The tutors’ corner provides excellent free guidance including preparing learning materials (PDF) to help make your resources and documents more accessible (with notes on good layout, fonts, signposting, plain English, and much more).

Mostly pages of links but there’s also a very useful list of 20+ reading strategies- each one leading to a more detailed explanation. These include SQ3R, cloze procedures, open minded portraits, readers’ theatre, directed listening activities and many more.