The Literacy Approach for foreign language teaching

 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...