Literacy and Numeracy Capabilities in the Australian Curriculum: What do teachers need to know?

Educators in the 21^st century are expected to know more about Literacy and Numeracy Capabilities in the Australian Curriculum, and how they apply to other subjects other than Maths or English. Additionally, as an educator in today’s secondary schools, you are expected to understand what literate and numerate thinking is, and know what related elements there are in both literacy and numeracy.

So what does Literacy Capabilities mean in the context of the Australian curriculum? According to the Australian Curriculum and Assessment Reporting Authority, students make progress towards being literate when they progress the information and skill that they know, using it to understand and use language with confidence in the environments of school, home and in broader society (Australian Curriculum and Assessment Reporting Authority [ACARA], n.d.).

In terms of encouraging students to apply literate thinking, educators can encourage students apply literate thinking by having them to apply their literary knowledge to understand and analyze information, not just in other subjects in school, but in real life situations requiring comprehension skills as well. It goes further to explain that using literacy thinking to become literacy capable isn’t just about retaining skills and information, but is actually about using a broad range of literary skills, to become independent thinkers and learners capable of being open to new ideas, and being able to scrutinize and interrogate the interpretations and prejudices in texts (ACARA, n.d.). Figure 1 shows that the key points in being literacy capable by using a literary mindset, which can also be succinctly summarized into six concepts that are mutually related.

Figure 1. Key Ideas for Literacy. Reprinted from Australian Curriculum and Assessment Reporting Authority. Retrieved from https://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/f-10-curriculum/general-capabilities/literacy/

In regards to numeracy capability, students make progress in their numeracy capability through learning mathematical concepts and skills, recognizing their use in other contexts, and using those abilities broadly in other areas of their life, whether it be in other subject areas or in the wider world (ACARA, n.d.). It is a similar situation with numerate thinking, as students can practice their numerate thinking by applying it to broader contexts in other subjects or in real life. For example, a student may use mathematics to plan and calculate a party budget, or to understand the concept of magnitude when learning about the Richter scale in a Geology class, thereby demonstrating their ability to apply numeracy concepts in a wide range of contexts. Similar to literacy, there are also six key ideas for Numeracy, which teachers are expected to help their students understand to become numeracy capable (Fig. 2).

Figure 2. Key ideas for numeracy. Reprinted from Australian Curriculum and Assessment Reporting Authority.  Retrieved from https://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/f-10-curriculum/general-capabilities/numeracy/

               

            So now we know what Literary and Numeracy thinking and capability is, but how are they interrelated? Both Literacy and Numeracy skills require the student to develop their comprehension and reasoning skills, and both require the student to explore new ways to use their learned skills in different contexts. Developing numeracy capabilities helps students understand maths related words, charts, statistics and concepts in literacy based subjects, and developing literacy skills helps in understanding maths problems involving word problems and comprehending instructions (ACARA, n.d.). As Hogan (2000) explains, in a literacy heavy subject such as History, students use their numeracy skills to analyze historical data, as well as making sense of scaled timelines and historical dating systems. Literacy skills are also often needed in numeracy heavy subjects, for example there are many maths problems that are presented in story form, which requires literary comprehension skills, not to mention the useful ability to process, understand a range of texts with mathematically related terms in disparate contexts (Zygouris-Coe, 2015).

            To sum up, the terms Literacy and Numeracy encompass not just the subjects of maths and English, but include a broader range of skills that can be used on other interrelated contexts and subjects as well. As for the concepts of literate and numerate thinking, in an educational context it simply means encouraging students to think literately and mathematically in in disparate situations in and out of school. These aforementioned points are critical for teachers to understand when incorporating literacy and numeracy into their curriculum.