The Literacy Approach for foreign language teaching

 As I mentioned in my last post, I have been able to develop the Literacy Approach with the help of a great number of  teachers and colleagues all over the world. Some of the results of this collaboration are freely available on the net, and can serve as an introduction to the Approach: 1. Web page of the Erasmus + project : here you can find an introduction to the Approach as well as some literacy units created by primary teachers from Poland, Slovenia and Spain. Since all the units were implemented in the teachers' classes, you can find the teaching materials as well as examples of student productions and snippets of video recordings of the lessons themselves. 2. MOOC about the Approach : this is a free online course that was generated as part of the Erasmus+ project. It gives you an introduction to the Approach and takes about 9 hours to complete. You may want to watch this video to get an idea about the contents of the course:   3. A blog in Spanish : in Spanish ...

It must have been in 2006 when I went to visit a primary school in the north of Madrid where a CLIL program had been introduced. Students were learning subjects like Social Sciences in English alongside their regular English classes. This meant that they were exposed to the language for quite a large part of the day - in fact they all greeted me in English with great enthusiasm. During my visit, I asked the English teacher if they had adapted the methodology of the English lessons to the new project, to which he responded with a wide smile: "Yes, of course! We now do a book and a half instead of just one per year." Despite the teacher's enthusiasm, just increasing the number of textbook pages that are covered seemed a little disappointing. There had to be more than that. This exchange is the starting point of my attempt to look for "something more" in teaching English - or any other foreign language really - and over the years, through many opportunities to inte...