Radio interview about the Literacy Approach

-

Since I have just received the link to the interview I did this morning on radio (in Spanish), I thought I might share it here: https://cadenaser.com/audio/1654164271149/ Hope you enjoy it!


(https://unsplash.com/es/fotos/yE5_bQNQgfU?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditShareLink)

If you want to receive a notification when new posts are published, why not follow?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What can you teach here?

-
Image
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
Read more

The second part of the planning grid (I)

-
Image
I hope the last posts about the first part of the planning grid made sense to you, and promise the second part is much more straightforward 😉 This is because the "difficult part" is identfying the teaching points in a text and selecting the ones that are relevant for the particular group of students the unit is aimed at. The rest is more like the teaching we are used to - at least in principle. The second part of the planning grid is divided into two phases, reception and production. This division reflects the idea that, before students can be asked to produce a text they must understand how it works, and for this must have had the chance to enjoy and analyze a model text. This means that the first step is the reading / listening / viewing phase, which is appropriately introduced through a series of "pre-" exercises that present the topic and create a chance for students to activate their background knowledge. Most teachers will be familiar with this kind of exerc
Read more

The Literacy Approach to Teaching Foreign Languages

-
Image
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
Read more