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...

During this academic year 21-22 I have been able to work with three schools in on-site PD seminars . The aim was to create some literacy units to be used with students of English and by doing so become more familiarized with the approach. One of the schools, Infanta Leonor, has already finished their work, which is now publicly available on the Internet:  Seminario Infanta Leonor Literacy Approach | Mediateca de EducaMadrid  The material consists of three units of work on different texts (Harry Potter, The Day the Crayons Quit and Romeo and Juliet), in which students are asked to create different types of texts: the description of a person they admire (video), a booktrailer (video) and a written newspaper report. The work done by this team of teachers is, frankly, quite amazing, and, apparently, their students are making great progress and enjoying this way of working. Looking at the units, I am really impressed by the choice of model text. For example, choosing the "Sorting H...

 As I mentioned in my last post, I have been able to develop the Literacy Approach with the help of a great number of  teachers and colleagues all over the world. Some of the results of this collaboration are freely available on the net, and can serve as an introduction to the Approach: 1. Web page of the Erasmus + project : here you can find an introduction to the Approach as well as some literacy units created by primary teachers from Poland, Slovenia and Spain. Since all the units were implemented in the teachers' classes, you can find the teaching materials as well as examples of student productions and snippets of video recordings of the lessons themselves. 2. MOOC about the Approach : this is a free online course that was generated as part of the Erasmus+ project. It gives you an introduction to the Approach and takes about 9 hours to complete. You may want to watch this video to get an idea about the contents of the course:   3. A blog in Spanish : in Spanish ...

It must have been in 2006 when I went to visit a primary school in the north of Madrid where a CLIL program had been introduced. Students were learning subjects like Social Sciences in English alongside their regular English classes. This meant that they were exposed to the language for quite a large part of the day - in fact they all greeted me in English with great enthusiasm. During my visit, I asked the English teacher if they had adapted the methodology of the English lessons to the new project, to which he responded with a wide smile: "Yes, of course! We now do a book and a half instead of just one per year." Despite the teacher's enthusiasm, just increasing the number of textbook pages that are covered seemed a little disappointing. There had to be more than that. This exchange is the starting point of my attempt to look for "something more" in teaching English - or any other foreign language really - and over the years, through many opportunities to inte...