What+is+Literacy?

Literacy is, basically speaking, the ability to read and write. More than that, literacy is the ability to communicate and understand. It is the ability to express your thoughts and ideas both verbally and through written language.

There are two pedagogical methods to teaching literacy. These two are: 1. Skills Approach 2. Whole Language

In a skills approach, students are taught skills individually and explicitly. Students taught using this approach are strong in decoding and phonics skills, among others.

In a whole language approach, students are not taught individual skills. These students have better comprehension because they are not stopping to try and take apart a word to put it back together and then go on in the sentence. They instead skip over it and go back to it using the rest of the sentence maybe to try and figure it out.