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...

 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...

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...