The Literacy Approach for foreign language teaching

In one of the first entries we talked about backward planning  as one of the key principles in the approach. In this entry I'd like to talk about the learning path. Backward planning means that my first thought in the process of planning a lesson is about what I would like to achieve with my students, or what my students will have to produce at the end of the unit. To further clarify my expectations, I ask myself about the characteristics of this production, what it should look like, and what my students can be expected to achieve in the unit. This is what goes into the "level expected" column on the first page of the planning grid. This process is essential, as it will give me - and my students - a clear sense of direction, and everything we do in class will help them achieve this final production.   However, so far this is no more than an aim, and my students are not able to reach it by themselves - they need to reflect on the characteristics of the text they have to pr...

 After a long and restful summer break (the heat made it a rather challenging summer!), I am back to complete the work on the unit about Florence Nightingale and biography writing. You will remember that we already looked at the reception phase, so now it's the turn of the production phase  divided into a guided production phase, where students have the possibility of doing more controlled practice on some aspects of the text, and a free production phase, where they acually write the biography. I must admit that while the structure is very clear for me, I tend to take it for granted that students will be able to write good texts once we have worked on their characteristics. I  have to make a conscious effort to allow enough time for their guided practice, and if I don't, the result is often disappointing. In the unit designed for the Florence Nightingale text, the focus is on three different features of the model text: the need to include factual and specific information,...

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...

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...

 As I said in an earlier blog entry , the planning process in the Literacy Approach starts from the back, with a decision about the kind of text I want my students to produce: a recipe, a description of a character from a book, an explanation of a natural phenomenon or a report of some kind. Then I have to narrow down my choice: will this recipe of mine be a written recipe or a video? Will it be addressed at children, novices or experts? Do I want the report to be a newspaper report of an important event, a radio report about a robbery or an informal report on a school outing for a school yearbook. All these decisions will have an impact on the characteristics of the text I would like my students to produce, and therefore on the teaching points of the unit.      To organize this information, the first part of the planning grid asks teachers to identify the type of text they are going to work on in the unit and provide some information about the students the unit is...

 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...

 As I mentioned in my last post, I have been able to develop the Literacy Approach with the help of a great number of  teachers and colleagues all over the world. Some of the results of this collaboration are freely available on the net, and can serve as an introduction to the Approach: 1. Web page of the Erasmus + project : here you can find an introduction to the Approach as well as some literacy units created by primary teachers from Poland, Slovenia and Spain. Since all the units were implemented in the teachers' classes, you can find the teaching materials as well as examples of student productions and snippets of video recordings of the lessons themselves. 2. MOOC about the Approach : this is a free online course that was generated as part of the Erasmus+ project. It gives you an introduction to the Approach and takes about 9 hours to complete. You may want to watch this video to get an idea about the contents of the course:   3. A blog in Spanish : in Spanish ...

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...