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...

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 promised, in this blog entry I will share with you the first part of a planning grid for a unit on biographies, that takes the biography of Florence Nightingale as a starting point. You can see that the first three boxes in the planning grid contain basic information about the unit: who it was designed for, what kind of text we are working on and where to find the model text. If we look at the second box, it specifies the type of text we are working on, and then states that this "= General aim of the unit". What this means is that if we are working on a given text type, this is also the text type we are going to ask our students to produce. This working from a model text to a similar production may look a bit mechanic and uninteresting, but it is a crucial part of the Approach : only if my students have developed the necessary understanding of how a given text works and looked at some specific strategies the author uses, can they be expected to produce a text of this kin...

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...