JP/DON

Amid students’ low literacy skills, high school curricula need to include university-preparation courses to help students enter academic communities where reading and writing are essential.     

Senior high school and vocational school graduates wishing to continue studying at university can be considered “strangers” or “outsiders” who are struggling to enter a specific community – to be precise an academic community. To be accepted in this community means that they need to acquaint themselves with the conventions or norms to which academics abide.

 Irrespective of what the students have already planned for their post-secondary learning, they ought to be proficient in the literacy skills that the academic community requires. These skills include reading, summarizing and synthesizing ideas from books or journal articles written in an academic style both orally and in written form.

 While these academic skills are not uncommon in a university, many senior high school graduates, even those who previously did well, have big trouble to reading and comprehending academic books effectively. It is often an arduous feat for them to grasp the gist of what they read, let alone extract and synthesize the contents.

The problems get worse when the students are faced with assignments that require them to read and summarize the content of books written mostly in English. Apart lacking effective reading skills in general, the inability to read in a foreign language also encumbers students’ literacy endeavors. Academic textbooks required for a reading assignment in university are mostly written in English, yet high school graduates are often ill-prepared to read them.  

Oddly enough, despite this common problem, school curricula are not designed to address a lack of literacy among senior high schoolers – both in their native language and in a foreign language like English.   

Given the urgency of enhancing both reading and writing skills, it is now time to give thought to designing a university-preparation curriculum, with an emphasis on academic literacy. This is to say that both academic reading and writing assignments should become regular activities in the classroom.

The university-preparation curriculum has to envision possible down-to-Earth strategies in its contents to teach students how to deal with their assignments once they enter university. These strategies may include how to select academic reading materials that suit their purposes, how to read them effectively and critically, how to assess every idea stated in books, how to write reports on them and how to employ academic literacy conventions appropriately in order to avoid plagiarism or misuse of another writer’s ideas and arguments.

Technological world   

Furthermore, in the context of a rapidly evolving technological world, the preparation curriculum also needs to integrate academic literacy skills with technology. This integration can help accelerate students’ literacy abilities in a more nuanced and contextual way.

Already being equipped with sophisticated technological devices, students can learn with ease how reading from various sources on the internet can provide useful insights to them to write not only in an academic style, but also in other styles. Information can be accessed in a split second and this certainly helps facilitate academic learning.

Under the instructors’ guidance, practicing academic skills using sources on the internet can also help students sharpen their understanding that not everything they see and read on the internet should be accepted wholesale, but instead needs to be critically assessed.

It seems clear then that academic literacy skills constitute an essential foundation for high school graduates to succeed in post-secondary education. Students will not be able to adjust themselves in an academic community where literacy practices prevail if they lack reading and writing skills.

Nevertheless, while it is necessary to implement a university-preparation curriculum, this will not suffice unless teachers’ professionalism is updated. It takes professional teaching staff to realize this idea. The inculcation of literacy practices should be exemplified by the efforts of teachers to serve as role models for their students.

Thus, the yawning gap in literacy skills that exists between high school learning and post-secondary learning needs to be minimized by strenuous efforts on the part of schools in equipping students with the necessary skills. It is their obligation. In fact, they should be held accountable if they do not do so.

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