Advanced Literacy

In the advanced literacy stage, students begin to read “adult” texts such as Shakespeare and Dickens. These texts are far-removed from the students’ personal experiences and have complex vocabularies and sentence constructions. As their reading becomes more diverse, students begin to write about broader, more abstract topics. During these years, students should be able to read and comprehend advanced texts as well as research, analyze, and write about them. Typically, this stage is associated with grades tenth through twelfth.

Most of my classes taken during the advanced literacy stage never challenged me to think on any new or advanced grounds. My English classes failed to discuss Shakespeare beyond a surface level and never discussed Dickens, or writers like him, at all. Disappointed with the literature instruction, I turned to new subjects: math and science.

In these subjects, technology was essential. We used graphing calculators to graph linear and non-linear equations; we used computers to create, compare, and store charts and graphs for physics and chemistry. In this way, my critical thinking skills improved, but my reading and writing levels remained at a refinement stage level.

In a required computer class, we learned how to use Microsoft Office and especially how each Microsoft Office program could be used in conjunction with another. For example, an address database can be created in Microsoft Access and used with the mail merge function in Microsoft Word. I actually found this class was quite interesting, and it helped me use and understand Microsoft Office. However, when I graduated high school, I still had no idea how to write a research paper, and transiting into the final stage, Expert Literacy and Beyond, was no easy task.