Literacy plays an important part in the curriculum at Albany Secondary Education Support Centre. Upon enrolment, students undergo initial assessments to determine individual needs in a range of areas including Communication Skills, Phonological Awareness, Word Attack, Sight Words, Reading and Spelling. Frequent assessments are conducted throughout the year, in order to determine the effectiveness of the program and to measure student development.
All of our teachers are highly skilled and trained to address individual student’s literacy needs through a range of curriculum areas. A dedicated literacy teacher, has been employed to offer support to classroom teachers, as well as within the classroom in order to develop targeted and meaningful programs to develop student literacy in a range of areas, including Reading, Writing, Spelling, Speaking and Listening.
ASESC Literacy Priorities
- Improving phonemic awareness and spelling.
- Engaging and interpreting different types of texts, such as recounts, Informative texts and narratives.
- Creating texts
- Developing sentence structure, vocabulary and grammar as well as punctuation when speaking, reading and writing.
- Developing functional communication skills, either orally or with augmented devices such as the App Proloquo2Go on the iPad.
Literacy Resources and Programs
A range of resources are utilized by teachers to support student Literacy development including Alpha to Omega, Letters and Sounds and Diana Rigg to support Phonological Awareness and Spelling and decodable readers such as Moon Dogs, Totem, Talisman, Blake Education, Star Struck and Quest to support reading. In addition to this an intensive program called Multi Lit which supports word attack and sight word acquisition.
Multi Lit
The Multi Lit (Making Up Lost Time in Literacy) program is an evidence based literacy intervention program. During transition into our school, students word attack and sight word skills are assessed. Those students who meet criteria for this program are enrolled into Word Attack and/or Sight Words programs. The students are given approx. three, individual 20 minute lessons with trained staff per week.