What is Accelerated Literacy?

Accelerated Literacy (AL) doesn’t simply teach spelling, grammar and vocabulary.

It also teaches the ways of thinking – the discourses, or cultural knowledge – that underpin what these mean. This knowledge is an essential part of being able to decode text and therefore succeed educationally.

When AL is taught effectively, teachers are able to awaken a sense of the 'what', the 'how', the 'when', the 'where', and ultimately the 'why', of language choices in a text.

As a result of AL teaching, students gain control over how to put it all together.


The approach

Accelerated Literacy is an approach to teaching reading and writing that:

  • Teaches students to be fully participating members of a literate society: ‘full members, not just with access, but also with a zest for participating and an instinct to exercise agency’ (Freebody, 2004: 4).

  • Promotes the use of regular routines based on strategies that provide a context for classroom lessons: ‘Education cannot simply be merely the experience of a series of consecutive events. It must be a developmental process in which earlier experiences provide the foundations for making sense of later ones.  For those involved in teaching and learning, continuous shared experience is one of the most precious resources available' (Mercer, 2001: 248).

  • Lays the foundations of English literacy with continuous shared experiences through carefully chosen texts.


Through a whole book (in early childhood classes) or a passage from one (for older year levels), fluent reading and discussion of a familiar text becomes a powerful resource for learning how the ‘ground rules’ of English literacy work in a classroom context.


Accelerated Literacy can offer a solution

Being literate means being able to navigate and shape your world and your future.

The sight of a 16-year-old boy struggling to read a year one book about a fox in a box – his head down, hands over his face, mumbling apologies – is humiliating for the student and chastening for any educator.

Yet many marginalised students – particularly those from remote Indigenous schools in Australia – fail to learn even the most basic reading skills.

This is because understanding how reading and schooling works is not a given for any student: it needs to be taught.

This is where Accelerated Literacy teaching offers a solution to students who otherwise remain illiterate.


Getting the right texts

Accelerated Literacy starts with the premise that you can’t teach complex skills from simple text.

If students are behind in their reading, they won’t catch up with others at a higher level unless you teach them at that higher level.

Teach them at a low level and that’s where they’ll stay.

Accelerated Literacy helps teachers to teach at the level they want students to reach, which may be four or five years above where they currently are.


The teaching sequence

The teaching sequence is a group of inter-related teaching strategies, which create a framework for highly effective teaching techniques using well-written, age-appropriate books.

The students learn high-level literacy skills in context by developing common knowledge about the book.


Laying the ground rules

Students who have no background in literacy don’t understand the ground rules for how schools work or for looking at a book or an illustration and then answering questions about it.

But whose problem is that?

One of Accelerated Literacy’s premises is that not understanding any of these ground rules – in other words, not having the cultural knowledge - is not the students’ problem, because they have a rich background in their own cultures.

Accelerated Literacy uses written texts to ‘scaffold’ students into the invisible rules of Western schooling, to build their confidence and knowledge and engage them in reading.