The Literacy Approach to Teaching Foreign Languages

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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 interact with teachers from different educational levels, as well as engage in research with colleagues from all over the world, I was able to develop the Literacy Approach. The Approach starts from the idea that most of our communication is through texts - oral, written, visual and audiovisual - and that in teaching we need to give students the tools to become skilful at creating and understanding texts. This menas that rather than teaching vocabulary and grammar for their own sake, in the Literacy Approach both become tools - or building blocks - for students' production. Everything they learn in any unit of work is therefore both meaningful and memorable, because it enables them to complete the final task which is some kind of text - from a written description to a podcast, a poster about an experiment or a short booktrailer.      

This Approach has been fully described in a short volume I recently published with Palgrave/Macmillan. 


However, because books are static in that they are published once and then difficult to change again, and that they don't allow interaction with the readers, I had the need to accompany this publication by a more interactive tool like this blog. This will hopefully become a platform for readers to ask questions and for me to share new insights into the Approach, post support materials for teachers and give me and other practitioners a space where they can share their experiences about putting the Literacy Approach into practice. 

I do hope I can get it to fulfil this purpose and am looking forward to your comments!

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