The Literacy Approach for foreign language teaching

 To llustrate what was said in the last blog entry , I have filled in the Reception Phase in the plannig grid for the unit on Florence Nightingale. As we said in this last entry, the work on the text type biography  starts with some exercises that prepare students to read, understand and enjoy the text. In this case, since the text is somewhat specialized as it talks about nursing, I decided to do some vocabulary work to start with. The other possible source of difficulty our students may have is related to the relevance of Florence Nightingale as one of the few upper-class women in the 19th century to be able to work. Without an awareness of how unusal this situaton was 200 years ago, most students will probably not fully understand the relevance of the person we are dealing with in this unit - hence the next two taks in the teaching sequence. With the scene thus set for the students to be able to understand the text, we ask them to predict its content. This is a reading str...

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...