practice. For children with special learning needs, a balanced approach to literacy education can be recommended. In such an approach, literacy education is aimed at the integration of activities that stimulate communication and knowledge acquisition as well as activities that promote the learning and automation of the school-learned skills described in our study . Teachers can help children with limited cognitive capacities to use strategies to structure a text by making maps, flow charts, and outlines. To increase the reading motivation of the children, their environments and interests should be the focus of attention. Reading motivation can be directly influenced by encouraging children to read interesting books that address their own experiences. From this perspective, teachers and students should seek information and knowledge together and also try to find solutions to problems together (see Snow, Burns, and Griffin, 1998). Further, it is important to promote and support children’s academic self-confidence for purposes of literacy learning.
Responsiveness is the key characteristic of a competent teacher. Via the
demonstration of certain communicative acts or the description of specific problem- solving strategies, the teacher can promote observational learning, imitation, and thereby mastery on the part of the child. Effective teachers know how to flexibly select elements from various techniques for employment in accordance with the needs of the students themselves. Starting from a positive classroom climate, the teacher’s task is to stimulate small groups of students to explore a particular subject domain, provide feedback, and explain the relevant cognitive and social goals as needed. Scaffolding, which is a term introduced by Wood, Bruner, and Ross (1976), is a crucial strategy in which the teacher simplifies the complexity of a learning task in dialogue with the student. As a coach, the teacher can guide students through a learning process until they are able to monitor the process themselves. And with recurrent coaching, the teacher can help students gain greater control over the learning process and thus become less dependent on the direct environment. A clearly balanced approach to literacy education can only occur when the team and classroom climates are optimal. A positive team climate can be promoted by strengthening the communication and degree of collaboration within a school. A positive class climate can be established or maintained by solving or preventing such problems as bullying, hurting, and stealing with several social-skills programs currently available for this purpose. Finally, it is important to have parents involved in the literacy activities of their children throughout their school careers. That is, close cooperation between a wide area of educational institutes and institutes for family activation can be viewed as mandatory to harmonize development of children’s reading literacy.
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