The Literacy Approach for foreign language teaching

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...

What does a foreign language teacher teach? The foreign language, right? Or maye not only. Maybe language teachers also need to deal with texts: how they are constructed, how to organize the ideas in a text to make it communicate what I want, how to link ideas... It should come as no surprise that the Literacy Approach is firmly based on the second view of language teaching. And because this is not what most foreign language teachers are trained to do, this "textual" aspect is the one that appears first in the teaching points section of the planning grid. The "textual" aspect is further divided into two elements, text features and text effect. The first one focuses more on the formal aspects of the texts, the ones that can be seen by watching the video, reading the text or listening to the podcast: the use of direct speech, the structure into paragraphs, the way the image and the words on the screen communicate together in a power-point presentation, etc. The secon...