The UCF Literacy Symposium is a professional learning outreach initiative within the UCF School of Teacher Education that continually supports the professional needs of PreK-12 educators in the fields of reading and literacy education.

Founded in 2000, the symposium hosts in-person and online events for educators, scholars, researchers, and the community throughout the year and provides a monthly newsletter with resources applying recent literacy scholarship.

The UCF Literacy Symposium outreach also highlights and supports School of Teacher education graduate degrees in Reading Education and the PhD in Education, Teaching, Learning, and Development doctoral program track.

2024 Literacy Symposium

Connect-Ignite-Grow: Keys to Fostering Students’ Academic Language, Literacy, and Learning

Academic language, “the specialized language, both oral and written, of academic settings that facilitates communication and thinking about disciplinary content” (Nagy & Townsend, 2012, p. 92), is essential to all students’ literacy, learning, and success.

Our 2024 events will focus on the following 3 keys to fostering students’ academic language, literacy, and learning in grades preK-12.

  1. Connect with students, value, and build upon, their linguistic and other assets.
  2.  Ignite students’ interests and engagement in learning through language- and literacy-rich classroom environments.
  3.  Grow students’ academic language through quality instruction, feedback, and meaningful applications.

As a professional literacy community, we are committed to learning at the forefront of literacy, together. We look forward to seeing you in our 2024 webinars!

Upcoming Events

Longitudinal research shows that vocabulary and oral language abilities early on in preschool and kindergarten are some of the strongest predictors of reading achievement in grades three and beyond. Coupled with strong decoding and spelling abilities, vocabulary and language provide…
Our monthly webinars will resume in Fall 2023.

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For more information and related questions, please contact LitSymposium@ucf.edu.

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