An Attainable Version of High Literacy: Approaches to Teaching Higher-Order Skills in Reading and Writing

ABSTRACTOne way of criticizing contemporary literacy education is to credit it with trying to do the right things, but to argue that the means could stand improvement. With great variation in the amount and kind of improvement recommended, this seems to be the line of criticism taken by almost everyone from alarmist critics (e.g., Cooperman 1978; Flesch 1981) to blue-ribbon panelists (e.g., Anderson, Hiebert, Scott, and Wilkinson 1985; National Commission on Excellence in Education 1983). A quite different line of criticism, however, attacks the aim of contemporary literacy education, charging it with being oriented toward the development of a low form of literacy. In their historical analysis of literacy instruction. Resnick and Resnick (1977) identify high literacy and low literacy as distinct educational traditions. High literacy has been a tradition in education of the elites in Europe and America. It has been aimed at developing the linguistic and verbal reasoning abilities, the literary standards an...

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