Not Just for English Class: Literacy Support Across the Curriculum

Adolescents deserve homes, communities, and a nation that will support their efforts to achieve advanced levels of literacy and provide the support necessary for them to succeed.
—Position Statement on
Adolescent Literacy, International Reading Association

Literacy coaching can occur in many contexts. It can be an integral part of tutoring in other content areas and a range of out-of-school time activities. We can see one approach to incorporating literacy coaching into a science unit through the weekly tutoring log below. Keeping a session-by-session record of tutor/tutee interaction is important—documenting your tutee’s work and progress, guiding a replacement if you are absent, or providing samples of your work to other tutors and supervisors.

Working with middle and high-school students sometimes requires tutors to learn something new or brush up on forgotten information. When Vadim, a seventh-grader, brought books on the weather to his tutor, Sharon, she didn’t remember much about the topic. To prepare, she found some resources, like Weather for Dummies, at her public library. Here’s her record of a week’s work, including tutoring plans and notes about her student’s responses (see record in PDF format).

Looking over this schedule, we see that Sharon’s tutoring plan incorporated several effective practices. She:

• Took initiative to learn about the topic herself
• Located additional resources
• Planned sessions around Vadim’s concerns and classroom expectations
• Incorporated literacy support—both comprehension strategies and vocabulary work
• Integrated “daily use” resources (the taped TV forecasts)
• Added hands-on activities (drawing clouds, tornado in a bottle)

Building Vocabulary Across the Content Areas, Beyond the Dictionary: Strategies for Finding Word Meanings