Literacy+Right

All kids should have the right to be able to pick their own books to read for classes at times, not being limited to only the ones that are mandated by the district. Of course students cannot pick every text on their own but they should be able to pick a few as it should be their right to read something engaging to them. By picking texts that specifically interest them (these must be approved by the teacher), it gives the student a chance to build their literacy skills stronger. The ways to build stronger literacy is to read as much as possible obviously. However, young minds find it difficult to do this through a lack of motivation. This lack in their motivation is attributed to them being forced to read required texts that are not engaging to them. For example, lets take a minority student who comes from a poor background. As part of an assignment or project, the teacher has their students read personal diaries and quotes from the lives of Henry Ford, John Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie. The students will be required to read through them all and make connections between their lives growing up and how they wound up to be the richest men in the United States during the early 1900's. The minority student from the poor background couldn't be any more different from these three men. After starting to read through the text this student will eventually become uninterested as he cannot find any connections between himself and the three men. This will inevitably cause the student to not be able to concentrate on the right things to be picked from the text and will make the reading more difficult for them which will ultimately result in a lower grade when they write their response for the assignment which they found themselves not quite fully understanding. Had this student had the choice to choose his own text, maybe he would have chosen three people he could identify with much better and would have an easier time reading since he was interested, thus creating a stronger literacy for himself. With students having more of a choice to appropriate texts, they can raise their proficiency in reading and have a better chance to obtain a higher set of literary skills while they are being engaged with text that they have chosen themselves. Students need to be able to use their own texts at times for the sake of making a social connection with their own lives. When doing outside reading these students are at the liberty at choosing whatever they want and often times there is a link embedded in the text that guides their comprehension of what they are reading. This keeps them wanting to read and interested in what they pick up because it is something they want to know or learn about. If this was intertwined in their curriculum, there would definitely be stronger literacy skills learned by all of the students as they could make use of their social networks as a tool to help them become better readers. It is the right of the students to be able to choose their own texts to read for classes at times. "Literacy theorists argue that choice in reading and writing tasks makes an enormous difference in one's motivation or engagement with those tasks. A number of studies have demonstrated that many young people do not read academic texts with proficiency or high interest. The lack of proficiency has been attributed variously to low literacy skills, to motivation and engagement, and to text difficulty." ** Elizabeth Moye and Jennifer Speyer from "The Reality of Challenging Texts in High School Science and Social Studies" ** "What may help youth persevere even in the face of challenging texts may be the fact that these texts are embedded in meaningful social networks of the young people's lives. As such, these social networks provide important background knowledge that helps youth establish a purpose, ask questions of text, monitor their comprehension, and synthesize ideas for each new text they read." ** Elizabeth Moye and Jennifer Speyer from "The Reality of Challenging Texts in High School Science and Social Studies" **