The Literacy Approach for foreign language teaching

The other day I was working with some English teachers. They had done good work in choosing their texts, all except for the group of teachers designing a unit for primary year 4, who wanted to work on a story but simply couldn't make up their minds about which text to use as a model. My co-trainer, Eva, suggested they should use a story called " The incredible bookeating boy ". The teachers just loved it, but when it came to selecting the teaching points they were not very sure what to do... If you read the story, you will probably find that it is written in the past tense, it uses some temporal linkers and it illustrates the use of combinatons of verb + infinitive or verb + -ing. But this is the same we would be doing in a traditional  English lessons, where texts are models of language only. However, in the Literacy Approach , the focus is on the text, on how the text is constructed and why it works so well. And in this case, the book illustrates the story arc to perfec

In the last blog entry the focus was on the learning path and how we as teachers need to support our students' progress along the path. However, with the large classes we normally teach it is often simply not possible for the teacher to know where exactly the students are and what they are still struggling with. This is where formative assessment comes in. In the words of some teachers who participated in one of my last courses, we need to build some checkpoints into the learning path to make sure students have understood and are able to do certain things. After all, the learning path should put the building blocks of a certain text type at students' disposal, so that they can then build their own texts, and it is therefore important to give them enough time and opportunity to get familiar with these bulding blocks. But what does formative assessment look like? Rather than explaining it myself, I am going to refer you to this very informative blog entry from Edutopia.  Formati

In one of the first entries we talked about backward planning  as one of the key principles in the approach. In this entry I'd like to talk about the learning path. Backward planning means that my first thought in the process of planning a lesson is about what I would like to achieve with my students, or what my students will have to produce at the end of the unit. To further clarify my expectations, I ask myself about the characteristics of this production, what it should look like, and what my students can be expected to achieve in the unit. This is what goes into the "level expected" column on the first page of the planning grid. This process is essential, as it will give me - and my students - a clear sense of direction, and everything we do in class will help them achieve this final production.   However, so far this is no more than an aim, and my students are not able to reach it by themselves - they need to reflect on the characteristics of the text they have to pr

This week, rather than talking about the Approach as such, I'd like to share with you something that happened a few days ago in my classes at university. On Monday I asked the students to think about a frightening experience they had had, and eager as they are as first-year students, and seeing that writing about a frightening experience was their first task, by our next class on Wednesday some of them had already uploaded their assignments for me to correct. We spent the whole two-hour session working on stories, distinguishing between stories and reports, talking about plots, looking at plot diagrams, and correcting a story written by a former student. At the end of the session the students confessed that they had already uploaded their stories and asked me if they would be able to delete them. When I told them I would have to do so for them they were dismayed and begged me "not to look at them"! For me this was the best feedback I could have wished for. The students ha

 After a long and restful summer break (the heat made it a rather challenging summer!), I am back to complete the work on the unit about Florence Nightingale and biography writing. You will remember that we already looked at the reception phase, so now it's the turn of the production phase  divided into a guided production phase, where students have the possibility of doing more controlled practice on some aspects of the text, and a free production phase, where they acually write the biography. I must admit that while the structure is very clear for me, I tend to take it for granted that students will be able to write good texts once we have worked on their characteristics. I  have to make a conscious effort to allow enough time for their guided practice, and if I don't, the result is often disappointing. In the unit designed for the Florence Nightingale text, the focus is on three different features of the model text: the need to include factual and specific information, the f

On to the last part of the planning grid now, which focuses on students' production. Through the reception phase , students have been able to enjoy a model text, talk about its content and become familar with its characteristics. The features dealt with can be structural (how ideas are organized), stylistic (how a certain effect is created), linguistic (vocabulary, pronunciation, etc.), and so on. By dealing with these features we are preparing students for their own production. This does not mean, however, that they will be able to speak, write or record straight away. Rather, students will still need some "safe space" to practise the stylistic strategies, use the linguistic elements, put the different parts of a text in the right order, etc. And this is what is done in the guided production stage. Teachers working with this approach sometimes complain that students depend on them too much for their production, and I often wonder to what extent this could be due to a lac