TEACHING READING AND WRITING IN THE 21TH CENTURY

Due to social contextual changes the teaching of reading and writing is changing. Although the main goal of education is to teach students to effectively use reading and writing skills, many schools around the world do not achieve this goal (Graham, 2019). Research shows a number of factors that hinder their adequate teaching: insufficient instruction and teacher preparation time, lack of critical and creative reading and writing longer texts that require analysis and interpretation, little cooperation among students, large number of students in classes and number of students with difficulties, absence of digital technology, infrequent use of formative assessment of achievement, insufficient encouragement of motivation to read and write, infrequent application of teaching procedures resulting from examples of good practice, weak teacher beliefs of reading and writing significance for the student's future, school policies that do not invest in teacher education and do not change existing education systems, and influences that do not sufficiently emphasize the value of reading and writing. The most commonly used programs in the world that have proven to be effective are also listed (Nikcevic-Milkovic, 2018). Based on the results of numerous studies, teachers who implement adequate reading and writing programs are the ones who design comprehensive and collaborative programs, devoting considerable time to reading and writing instructions and using instructional practices with proven evidence of success. Many teachers use writing to support higher-level learning and adapt reading and writing instruction to students with disabilities. What research proves to be bad is that many teachers overemphasize the teaching of basic reading and writing skills, while paying too little attention to critical processes such planning, drafting, correcting text when writing and reviewing text, identifying the main idea of the text, drawing conclusions and summarizing when reading (called reading and writing strategies) and self-regulation of learning in these two generic linguistic activities (Graham, 2018).