The Literacy Approach for foreign language teaching

 I have already mentioned in some other blog entry that while developing this Approach to teaching English, I had the opportunity to participate in an Erasmus+ project about literacy teaching in the foreign language classroom. While designing the project, our coordinator Katarzyna Brzosko Barratt, suggested that we create a planning tool for teachers using this Appproach , and this turned out to be one of the most important outcomes of the project: the planning grid. The reason why I consider it so important is twofold: on the one hand, in my experience, most teachers do not really plan their teaching but rather rely on textbooks to do it for them. Of course, this does not mean that they follow the textbook unblinkingly, but most of their planning consists in deciding which textbooks activites to do and which to skip, or selecting tasks that can complement the textbook. And, let's be honest, teachers don't have a lot of time to plan each one of their lessons as they would ma...

During this academic year 21-22 I have been able to work with three schools in on-site PD seminars . The aim was to create some literacy units to be used with students of English and by doing so become more familiarized with the approach. One of the schools, Infanta Leonor, has already finished their work, which is now publicly available on the Internet:  Seminario Infanta Leonor Literacy Approach | Mediateca de EducaMadrid  The material consists of three units of work on different texts (Harry Potter, The Day the Crayons Quit and Romeo and Juliet), in which students are asked to create different types of texts: the description of a person they admire (video), a booktrailer (video) and a written newspaper report. The work done by this team of teachers is, frankly, quite amazing, and, apparently, their students are making great progress and enjoying this way of working. Looking at the units, I am really impressed by the choice of model text. For example, choosing the "Sorting H...

One of the main principles that shape the Literacy Approach is backward planning. Coined by Wiggins & McTighe (2005), I first heard about it from my colleague Oliver Meyer. What backward planning consists in is starting the planning of a unit of work from the end of the teaching unit. This means that my first thought when planning a literacy unit will be: what do I want my students to be able to do (or, in our case, produce) at the end of the unit? Will I want them to create a video tutorial for an arts and craft project, a poster explanation of a science experiment or a written description of students' favourite holiday-site? Depending on the kind of text I want them to be able to produce, and of the medium chosen for this production (visual, audiovisual, spoken or written), my students will need different skills, knowlegde and understandings. This means that, if I start my planning process with the end production rather than with the contents the syllabus - or, let's be h...