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What You Need To Know About Teaching Literacy Knowledge
Katrina Freund
July 25, 2025
As teachers, one of our primary goals is to help students become skilled, lifelong readers and learners. But how do we truly unlock that potential and ensure reading and writing success for every learner? Focusing on literacy knowledge in the classroom can help.
Today, we’ll break down what literacy knowledge is and provide examples and tips on what teaching it looks like in the classroom.
Literacy knowledge is a crucial component of skilled reading. It focuses on understanding how language and text are organized for effective communication. It’s part of the language comprehension strands of Scarborough’s Reading Rope.
Literacy knowledge forms a foundation for the ways we read, write, and speak. It takes literacy beyond just decoding words to involve the skills of understanding, interpreting, and communicating meaning across subjects and topics.
[Why is literacy knowledge important?](id-why)
Developing strong literacy knowledge helps students become skilled, lifelong readers and critical thinkers. It helps them construct meaning from what they see, read, or hear. When readers understand the purpose and features of language and text, they can comprehend increasingly complex information.
Literacy knowledge can also help students develop their agency and literary tastes. This allows them to select books that are both appropriately challenging and interesting to read. When students have a strong foundation in literacy knowledge, it supports higher-level cognitive processes, making reading more memorable and meaningful.
Other benefits of building literacy knowledge include:
Enhanced reading comprehension
Strong literacy knowledge directly contributes to enhanced reading comprehension. It frees up cognitive attention, allowing the reader to focus on a deeper understanding rather than figuring out the mechanics of a text.
These skills enable students to make text connections and develop a deeper understanding of concepts and themes.
Fostering literacy knowledge can develop a lifelong passion for reading. When students have strong reading expertise and skills, they are more likely to engage in daily independent reading outside the classroom. This proficiency leads to increased confidence and engagement, enabling students to become skilled readers who genuinely enjoy the process.
Literacy knowledge is a multifaceted skill made up of multiple interconnected components. These include:
Print awareness and concepts
Print awareness refers to the understanding that printed text is organized in a specific way and conveys meaning. Students often encounter this component before they enter school, sometimes before they can talk, if they have exposure to books and adult guidance.
Key print concepts include things like knowing that we read words from left to right and top to bottom in English and that there are spaces between words.
Understanding genres and text features
A significant part of literacy knowledge comes from understanding text genres. Different types of books and stories are defined by their unique characteristics. Knowledge of genres can help students understand the common characteristics, themes, and structures of written texts, which supports comprehension.
Beyond genres, students also need to understand text structures and text features like a table of contents, chapter headings, and glossaries. Recognizing these elements helps students make sense of a text’s organization and understand how individual sections convey meaning or purpose.
Language structures and verbal reasoning
Language structures and verbal reasoning help students understand how language works to convey meaning. They include:
Phonology: The study of speech sounds and how they’re organized within a language to determine which sounds are meaningful
Morphology: The study of how words are formed and structured
Syntax: The set of rules that decide how words and phrases are arranged to make well-constructed, logical sentences
Semantics: The study of meaning in language
Pragmatics: The study of how language is used in context to understand what to say, when to say it, and how to say it appropriately
Metacognition and self-management strategies
Metacognition is the awareness of your mental processes. It plays a vital role in literacy development by allowing readers to monitor, regulate, and direct their own comprehension. Skilled readers use metacognition to:
Frame reasons or purposes for reading.
Plan how to read a text.
Monitor their reading process and decide when to take corrective action, like rereading.
Review and self-question to better understand a text.
Organize information after reading to fit their goals.
[How to teach literacy knowledge in the classroom](id-how)
Building strong literacy knowledge requires intentional and integrated instructional approaches. Try these strategies to help your students learn and practice their skills:
Integrate reading and writing
Reading and writing are intertwined. Integrating instruction in both areas can benefit students’ literacy knowledge and comprehension. Students can apply the elements they use in reading to their writing. For example, when they understand print concepts, they’ll learn to write left to right and top to bottom. If they understand text features, they’ll learn where and when to use headings and subheadings.
Writing about a text can also increase comprehension. In fact, it may have a greater impact than reading or discussing a text without a written component. Making organizational decisions as a writer also helps students decide how specific text structures and features convey ideas, reinforcing their reading experience.
Learn more about how Newsela ELA + Newsela Writing can help you with this strategy.
Introduce students to diverse and content-rich texts
Give students the opportunity to read a wide variety of genres like fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and news articles. This breadth of knowledge allows them to build frameworks for how texts work and strengthens their understanding of the key characteristics of different genres.
Beyond genre diversity, it’s also important to share texts with characters of different genders, cultures, and ethnicities. This strategy can provide both mirrors and windows while reading.
Mirrors happen when students see themselves or the people in their communities reflected back at them through a text. Windows happen when students step outside their own cultures and communities to see how others live.
Finally, building background knowledge through exposure to content-rich texts is critical for comprehension. When students know more about a subject, whether from prior knowledge or targeted learning, it becomes easier for them to gain meaning from new texts on that topic or related topics. Include cross-curricular reading materials in all subjects—like social studies, science, and math—to build literacy skills across all of them.
Provide explicit instruction and practice
Use explicit, systematic, diagnostic, and cumulative instruction to help students learn and practice their literacy knowledge. When you teach new concepts clearly and directly, you can scaffold from easier to more difficult concepts while ensuring students understand the full picture of how they work together. Some helpful instructional strategies include:
Modeling the use of text features when reading in class
Facilitating discussions about text organization or text connections
Allowing sufficient time for students to dive into complex topics and build background knowledge
Rely on assessments and data
Relying on formative assessments and data can help you determine student baseline performance and identify individual needs. When you analyze diagnostic results, you can differentiate instruction and assign lessons that target the specific areas where students need to improve their literacy knowledge.
Ongoing formative assessment, rather than waiting for summative results, allows you to monitor progress and adjust teaching strategies more quickly to meet your students’ needs.
Discover how Newsela ELA supports the science of reading
Many districts focus primarily on word-level skills, like decoding and fluency, as they implement the science of reading into their strategic plans. Those skills are critical, but to become skilled readers, students must also be proficient in key language comprehension skills like background knowledge and vocabulary.
And it’s all backed by multiple ESSA Tier II efficacy studies! Newsela ELA helps teachers meet students' unique learning needs with science-backed instructional methods they can trust.
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