
The Harefield Academy Literacy Strategy
Our aims:
- To focus on learning and how literacy is used as a tool for teaching and progression in every lesson and across the curriculum.
- To create opportunities to develop and enhance reading, writing, speaking and listening, grammar, spelling and articulacy.
- To support all teachers to develop their own deeper understanding of how to enhance the literacy skills of students, assess with confidence and develop learning opportunities as a result of improved literacy skills.
- To ensure teachers embed reading, writing and communication effectively across the curriculum, equipping all students with the necessary skills to make progress.
- To ensure students are eager to know how to improve their learning; to capitalise on opportunities to use feedback to improve.
We adhere to the following principles:
- Literacy supports learning. Students need vocabulary, expression and organisational control to cope with the cognitive demands of subjects.
- Reading enables us to learn from sources beyond our immediate experience.
- It is through language that we make and revise meaning.
- Writing helps us to sustain and order thought.
- Responding to higher order questions encourages the development of thinking.
- Better literacy leads to improved self-esteem, motivation and behaviour. It allows students to learn independently. It is empowering.
- All teachers and adults who students come into contact with during the school day are teachers of literacy.
We are striving to ensure students can:
- Express their ideas effectively and speak clearly.
- Develop a wider vocabulary.
- Use and understand more formal, standard registers of speech.
- Use spoken language to develop a deeper understanding of the ideas they are grappling with in their different subjects.
- Develop subject-specific terminology.
- Share ideas with other, using teachers and peers to enhance their knowledge and understanding.
- Develop skills in presenting arguments and points of view in a judged, balanced and appropriately assertive manner in both formal and less formal contexts.
- Focus more on what others are saying.
- Listen carefully to others’ points of view and learn from them, adapting their own views as appropriate.
- Understand more readily the formal language of text books and other subject-related materials.
- Recognise and adopt different written forms through exposure to a wide range of different types.
- Use accurate punctuation and grammar.
- Write at greater length and with more confidence.
- Adapt their written styles to suit a range of purposes and audiences.
- Write persuasively.
- Write at greater length and with increasing complexity.
Teachers will:
- Model high standards of literacy in their own teaching.
- Have displays in classrooms which include key terms on walls, technical equipment labelled, useful phrases to help students link and develop ideas in writing, grade descriptors/information related to examination courses, exemplar pieces of work, literacy signposts.
- Choose texts that are appropriate for their students’ prior knowledge, purposes and potential.
- Expect and encourage students to read for themselves wherever possible.
- Use teaching approaches that give students ways of accessing demanding texts.
- Know and demonstrate a range of reading strategies.
- Provide a range of opportunities for active engagement with texts that help to motivate students as readers.
- Know, understand and make explicit to students the main types of text used in their subject.
- Ensure that students with EAL are supported in their language needs.
- Apply the school marking policy.
- Provide writing frames or scaffolds to support extended writing and provide models of extended writing.
- Prepare students thoroughly for the reading/written requirements of examination papers, including signposting examination terminology.
- Plan lessons which make good use of opportunities to develop students’ literacy skills.