Balance Literacy Curriculum Analysis

There are several different views on what is a curriculum, from as simple as Oliva (1997) who cites a curriculum as that which is taught in schools; to more complex views According to Wilson(1990) Anything and everything that teaches a lesson, planned or otherwise. Humans are born learning, thus the learned curriculum actually encompasses a combination of all of the following — the hidden, null, written, political and societal etc. Since students learn all the time through exposure and modeled behaviors, this means that they learn important social and emotional lessons from everyone who inhabits a school — from the janitorial staff, the secretary, the cafeteria workers, their peers, as well as from the deportment, conduct and attitudes expressed

One of the first challenges the Caribbean learner faces is large variety of dialects found in different areas that is used as a substitute for the Standard English Language. The use of the Caribbean creole is popular used by many but when they are reading they will not find the text or reading materials been print in creole but rather in Standard English. What Kelly and the balance literacy curriculum suggest the experience of the learner should be used in order to develop reading writing and comprehension not just need of society use of the Standard English. According to Greaves, Greaves and Juel (2007) The balance literacy curriculum allows sharing from which, vocabulary will be clarified, it encourages the use of strategies to unlock meaning and support progress and the monitoring to the individual rather than just to society beliefs. This means that the language of the child should be used by the teacher through sharing, get meaning and clarify and vocabulary the guide the leaner to the use of the Standard English. Taylor, (1985) cites that traditional classroom methodologies employed in education have failed because they have been prescriptive and corrective and have focused too much on language structure rather than on communicative competence. This is a typical example of the society tends to lean towards

According Guthrie and Anderson (1999) they explain that "motivations and social interactions are equal to cognitions as foundations for reading" (p. 17). They believe that reading can be seen as. engagement because "engaged readers not only have acquired reading skills, but use them for their own purposes in many contexts" (p. 17); in fact, "an interested reader identifies with the conceptual context of a text so fully that absorbing its meaning is an effortless activity" (p. 19). Engaged readers are involved, interested and constantly learning from their text at all times. This also means that the child should be free to express their desire of the literature they want to read base on the interest Hence Kelly and the balance literacy curriculum can be applied for example the text will have stories from the Caribbean that the students can relate to and are interesting in such stories about mangos Caribbean games rivers and so on not about chimney, igloo which the child have never seen and can’t relate