The second part of the planning grid (I)

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 exercise, but it may still be worth thinking a bit about them. In this sense I recommend reading Timothy Shanahan's blog posts on the pitfalls of much pre-reading and on the characteristics of good pre-reading tasks. What is here said about reading can easily be transferred to listening and viewing.

Once the scene has been set for the model text, the next step focuses on understanding and enjoying the text, and doing so at different levels including the literal, but also inferred meaning or relations with students' own experience or other texts. I find the close reading model, as again explained by Shanahan, a useful guide in this respect, but not all texts are suitable for it.  

Once the text has been read, viewed or listened to, we will want to understand how it works and what makes this a good text on which we can model our own production. This means that we will start looking at the textual aspect first, but often already in connection with the linguistic features of the text. Since I explained the difference between the two at some length in another blog entry, I am going to skip this here. However, I need to point out that the division into observing (i.e. the textual) and analysing (i.e. the lingustic) is rather artificial, as structure is often expressed through language and the text effect may also depend on it. The fact that they are still kept separate is to make sure that the textual aspect is actually worked on, as teachers, by default, tend to focus on the linguistic aspects.

What I have done up to this point is describe the focus of the different tables in this second part of the planning grid, but what does actually go into them and how is it related to the first part of the planning grid? If you look at the document, you will see that the second column in all the tables is marked in red, highlighting that this is the most important part and relating it to the "red column" in the first part of the plannng grid. This second column contains the teaching points identified in the first part of the planning grid. Transferring them to the tables where the actual tasks are planned guarantees that we stay on track, really working on what we should be working, and that each of the tasks we plan actually contributes to the unit aim, which is for students to become able to produce a given text. 

The rest of the columns give information about the tasks as such (1st column), the language skill(s) practiced in the tasks, the way they are setp up, the materials that the teachers will need and finally, in which class session this task will be done and for how long. These are the typical elements of any planning which allow us to make sure that tasks are varied (in terms of type of work and skills practiced), that the teacher has all the necessary materials, etc. In "normal" teaching we do listening, reading, etc. exercises, which means we don't need to identify the skill(s) practiced, but in the Literacy Approach the communicative skills are practiced as a result of working on texts and building up students' understanding of, and skill in, using the language to commuicate. This means that we will speak about a scene of a film we have watched (i.e. listened to), we will take notes (i.e. write) about the way the camera is moving and share them with a partner (i.e. speaking), etc. Thus, looking at this column, we can make sure we are actually using and pracising all four communcative skills.

OK, all of this is very well, but what do the actual tasks look like? The Literacy Approach does not say anything about this - it is up to the teacher to decide which kind of task will be best to work on a given teaching point. Teachers are different, have different teaching styles and therefore prefer different kinds of tasks, and as we are dealing here with an approach rather than a method, there is room for this inividuality. I am convinced that trying to make everybody work in the same way is counterproductive. Of course, this will also require teachers to have a good understanding of the different choices they have at their disposal and keep a critical eye on the effectiveness of teaching tasks and the appropriateness of the task to work on a given teaching point. This is, quite obviously, much more demanding than providing teachers with a sequence of task types they have to use, or than following a textbook. Experience shows, however, that it is also much more empowering and motivating for teachers.

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