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...

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...

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...

 As I said in an earlier blog entry , the planning process in the Literacy Approach starts from the back, with a decision about the kind of text I want my students to produce: a recipe, a description of a character from a book, an explanation of a natural phenomenon or a report of some kind. Then I have to narrow down my choice: will this recipe of mine be a written recipe or a video? Will it be addressed at children, novices or experts? Do I want the report to be a newspaper report of an important event, a radio report about a robbery or an informal report on a school outing for a school yearbook. All these decisions will have an impact on the characteristics of the text I would like my students to produce, and therefore on the teaching points of the unit.      To organize this information, the first part of the planning grid asks teachers to identify the type of text they are going to work on in the unit and provide some information about the students the unit is...

Since I have just received the link to the interview I did this morning on radio (in Spanish), I thought I might share it here:  https://cadenaser.com/audio/1654164271149/  Hope you enjoy it! (https://unsplash.com/es/fotos/yE5_bQNQgfU?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditShareLink) If you want to receive a notification when new posts are published, why not follow ?

 I have already mentioned in some other blog entry that while developing this Approach to teaching English, I had the opportunity to participate in an Erasmus+ project about literacy teaching in the foreign language classroom. While designing the project, our coordinator Katarzyna Brzosko Barratt, suggested that we create a planning tool for teachers using this Appproach , and this turned out to be one of the most important outcomes of the project: the planning grid. The reason why I consider it so important is twofold: on the one hand, in my experience, most teachers do not really plan their teaching but rather rely on textbooks to do it for them. Of course, this does not mean that they follow the textbook unblinkingly, but most of their planning consists in deciding which textbooks activites to do and which to skip, or selecting tasks that can complement the textbook. And, let's be honest, teachers don't have a lot of time to plan each one of their lessons as they would ma...