NEW LITERACY SKILLS IN THE

21ST CENTURY CLASSROOM

DEFINITION OF 21ST CENTURY LITERACIES

The National Council of Teachers of English (2013) defines 21st Century literacies as the ability
to:
● Develop proficiency and fluency with the tools of technology;
● Build intentional cross-cultural connections and relationships with others so to pose
solve problems collaboratively and strengthen independent thought;
● Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes;
● Manage, analyze, and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information;
● Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multimedia texts;
● Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments. (NCTE, 2013)
With this definition in mind, it becomes clear that in today’s ever-evolving,
technological society, having new literacy skills is not an option – it’s a must.
Thanks to technology, the world is getting smaller, and we are communicating
with people globally on a regular basis. In order to be successful in today’s
society, one must be prepared to learn, adapt to, and use new literacies. Since
many of these new literacies are tied to proper use of technology, regular
instruction and practice in how to use technology platforms is paramount. As
such, teachers in all content areas must focus on teaching new literacy skills in
their classrooms. Not only does this prepare students for their life after high
school, it helps to close the digital divide that currently exists between students
from high socioeconomic households and those from low socioeconomic
households
 SKILLS THAT MUST BE TAUGHT TO ADDRESS THE GAP IN
STUDENTS’ NEW LITERACY SKILLS

. 1.The ability to identify questions and frame problems to guide reading on the internet,

2. The capacity to identify information that is relevant to one’s needs,

3. Competence with critically evaluating online information,

4. Facility with reading and synthesizing information from multiple multimedia sources, and

5. Understanding how to communicate with others in contexts where information is learned about and
shared collectively. (Nicholson & Galguera, 2013)

Students can’t learn these skills on their own. Just as with any other skill, students need guidance from
their teacher and an opportunity to practice these skills in a safe and collaborative environment
IMPROVING LITERACY SKILLS THROUGH LEARNING READING BY
WRITING: THE INTEGRATED WRITE TO LEARN
( iWTR) METHOD PRESENTED AND TESTED

Learning to read and write is a basic skill that unfortunately not everybody acquires
sufficiently. Lack of teachers and time in school are some of the reasons, but in addition
the enormous rise in informational activities due to the Internet and other information
technology-enabled opportunities has made literacy skills increasingly important to ever
more people. This means literacy education must be improved so more children in the
world get better chances. In order to contribute to developing better methods for
learning to read and write in early years this study tests a new method developed to
improve reading and writing learning in early ages. The ICT (Information and
communication technologies) supported “Integrated Write to Learn” (iWTR) method lets
children in 1st grade use computers and other ICT tools to write texts and subsequently
discuss and refine them together with class mates and teachers
The “Four literacy resources model” (Luke and Peter, 1997) specifies a set of
practices that children need to participate in so as to develop into good readers;
1.Breaking the code of written texts;

2.Participating in understanding and composing meaningful written, visual and

spoken texts;

3.Using texts functionally;

4.Critically analyzing and transforming texts