The concept of students learning to be literate and this consisting of reading, writing, listening, speaking, viewing, and understanding as mediated and enabled by by the written word is an anachronistic model of how learners need to function in the contemporary world.
The New London Group (2000) redefined the nature of literacy teaching as multiliteracies that function within any semiotic activity embedded within a design framework of available designs, designing, and redesigning. This theoretical framework and pedagogical approach has the benefit of being generally applicable within any learning discourse or subject area. It focuses on communication as the nature of what literacy is applied to and empowering the learner to know what is possible, how they can interact with that, and turning it to their own purpose.
The false dichotomy of behaviorism and constructivism figures into this as well. Our students are not merely vessels to be filled and yet without a foundation to engage from they will not be able to aim their engagement particularly high.
Even before I was qualified as a teacher and worked teaching circus skills to students I had my own framework of teaching individual skills with props as “words” and developing sequences of tricks as “sentences” with the goal of students being empowered to rearrange and reconfigure the work to make their own sentance sequence which reflected their own identity and passion.
This model uses the older version of literacy as a metaphor to enable progress in a physical discipline. The same metaphor can work in digital disciplines or even more disparate ones. Learn the components, learn how they fit together, empower yourself to rearrange them and create meanings that are meaningful to yourself.
References
The New London Group (2000). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: designing social futures. In B. Cope & Kalantiz, (Eds.), Multiliteracies: literacy learning and the design of social futures 9-37. London: Routledge.