The Literacy Approach for foreign language teaching

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

In the last blog entry the focus was on the learning path and how we as teachers need to support our students' progress along the path. However, with the large classes we normally teach it is often simply not possible for the teacher to know where exactly the students are and what they are still struggling with. This is where formative assessment comes in. In the words of some teachers who participated in one of my last courses, we need to build some checkpoints into the learning path to make sure students have understood and are able to do certain things. After all, the learning path should put the building blocks of a certain text type at students' disposal, so that they can then build their own texts, and it is therefore important to give them enough time and opportunity to get familiar with these bulding blocks. But what does formative assessment look like? Rather than explaining it myself, I am going to refer you to this very informative blog entry from Edutopia.  Formati