Developing Academic and Cultural Literacy Skills Through Videos
Abstract: When students’ understanding of literacy departs from the literacy expectations in the academia, their success is often jeopardized. Cultural literacy is described as “learning a discourse or culture” of a subject area. For instance, it is crucial for a student to have the awareness and understanding of the type of cognitive processes and language needed to be successful in a science class versus the skills required for reading and interpreting a poem in an English class. This kind of cognitive flexibility is fundamental to academic success, specifically for adult ESL learners who do not have strong literacy skills in their first language. In this best practices session, I will share some of the short videos I have created with my students. These videos are designed to promote cultural and academic literacy skills. Each of these videos has been created specifically for ESL learners from different language and cultural backgrounds to make the content more relatable to the viewers.