Overview

Dr Annah Healy lectures in and coordinates the Primary Language and Literacy units in the School of Cultural and Language Studies in Education, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia.

Her major interests are centred on literacy education and especially critical reading pedagogy. In particular she is concerned with the changes that must occur to reading education as a result of technological advances and text production. She takes a multiliteracies perspective for teaching and learning, and applies social and cultural theories to her work.

Dr Healy teaches both postgraduate and undergraduate studies through on-campus, distance and online modes of delivery. She has a vast experience in working with university students, consulting to professional groups, and with university teacher educators.

Dr Healy's most recent research projects in reading education include case studies on the changes to eight year old children's reading processes as a result of multimedia and interactive computer-based texts, and a longitudinal research project on readers at risk and their inside and outside classroom textual practices.

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Table of Contents

Introduction

• What is literacy? What is language? How do they differ?
• References

Chapter 1: Multiliteracies, models and classroom practice

• The importance of explicit teaching and recognition of what students bring with them to classrooms
• The four literacy roles
• The centrality of meaning to literate practice
• Making literate activity meaningful
• The importance of critical inquiry in literacy education
• Four central themes

Chapter 2: Writing and spelling

• A conceptual framework for teaching and learning
  • Words in context have meaning
  • An operating model
• Language to multiliteracies
  • Phonological/phonemic awareness
  • Alphabet awareness
    - Effective teaching strategies
  • Grapho-phonic awareness
    - Effective teaching strategies
  • Spelling awareness
    - Spelling and reading involve different sets of skills
    - Common spelling strategies used by beginning writers
    - Learning to spell through multi-sensory means
    - Using visual-auditory-kinaesthetic modalities
  • The developing speller
  • Toward independence in spelling
  • Word origins and vocabulary development
• References

Chapter 3: Reading

• Considerations for classroom practice
  • Redefining reading
• Print and multimedia interactive texts require different reading processes
  • Interpretative reading processes
  • Transformative reading processes
• Reading print from a page or screen: Some considerations
• Key concepts for teaching print-based reading (and writing)
  • Text-related knowledge
• Shared/modelled reading (and writing)
  • Considerations for practice
  • Prediction and reading
    - The importance of prediction in reading process
    - Strategies for assisting the prediction process
  • Paralanguage cues and reading
  • Semantic cues in reading
  • Syntactic cues in reading
• Guided reading (and writing)
• Independent reading (and writing)
  • Concept maps that address stereotyping
  • A concept map using an advertisement
  • Developing notions of exposition
  • Teacher reading to students
• References

Chapter 4: Reading interactive multimedia

• Reading a multimedia text display
• Reading and aesthetic response
• Nonlinearity and effects on reading process
• Interactivity and reading process
• A cautionary note
• Support factors: Human versus digital machine