The Literacy Approach for foreign language teaching

On to the last part of the planning grid now, which focuses on students' production. Through the reception phase , students have been able to enjoy a model text, talk about its content and become familar with its characteristics. The features dealt with can be structural (how ideas are organized), stylistic (how a certain effect is created), linguistic (vocabulary, pronunciation, etc.), and so on. By dealing with these features we are preparing students for their own production. This does not mean, however, that they will be able to speak, write or record straight away. Rather, students will still need some "safe space" to practise the stylistic strategies, use the linguistic elements, put the different parts of a text in the right order, etc. And this is what is done in the guided production stage. Teachers working with this approach sometimes complain that students depend on them too much for their production, and I often wonder to what extent this could be due to a lac...

 To llustrate what was said in the last blog entry , I have filled in the Reception Phase in the plannig grid for the unit on Florence Nightingale. As we said in this last entry, the work on the text type biography  starts with some exercises that prepare students to read, understand and enjoy the text. In this case, since the text is somewhat specialized as it talks about nursing, I decided to do some vocabulary work to start with. The other possible source of difficulty our students may have is related to the relevance of Florence Nightingale as one of the few upper-class women in the 19th century to be able to work. Without an awareness of how unusal this situaton was 200 years ago, most students will probably not fully understand the relevance of the person we are dealing with in this unit - hence the next two taks in the teaching sequence. With the scene thus set for the students to be able to understand the text, we ask them to predict its content. This is a reading str...