conception of literacy that encompasses the socio-political aspects. More importantly, the type of curriculum and the instructional approaches that should be used to advance the literacy of minorities will be discussed.
For the last 50 years, educators have adopted language and literacy curricula that are based on a reductionist perspective of how children learn, which deviate from their natural predisposition towards learning. In the traditional model of learning, school children are generally considered to be passive learners who absorb pieces of information in a "decontextualized, linear [and] verbocentric manner" before integrating them into a whole (Rossi 175). Basically, children are taught to focus on discrete elements of reading and writing skills that are often divorced from specific contexts (Street 1).
While children from mainstream culture are able to acquire new knowledge within this learning environment, this pedagogical approach is extremely foreign to children who come from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. When these children from foreign backgrounds fail to respond to this type of instructional approach, teachers often make the assumption that these students require even more simplified instruction that typically entails rote learning and drilling of discrete subskills (Rossi 175; Meier 243).
As pointed out earlier, instructors in traditional learning settings often reduce literacy to the acquisition of listening, reading and writing skills. Thus, they operate from the premise that students must master these skills at the most basic level. In practice, this means that the students have to learn how to decode written text phonologically, spell words with either phonetic or visual spellings, figure out the sound-letter correspondences, before they are allowed to move onto more complex, but more interesting texts (Ehri and Wilce cited in Drucker 23). It is little wonder that bilingual stu...