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...

This week, rather than talking about the Approach as such, I'd like to share with you something that happened a few days ago in my classes at university. On Monday I asked the students to think about a frightening experience they had had, and eager as they are as first-year students, and seeing that writing about a frightening experience was their first task, by our next class on Wednesday some of them had already uploaded their assignments for me to correct. We spent the whole two-hour session working on stories, distinguishing between stories and reports, talking about plots, looking at plot diagrams, and correcting a story written by a former student. At the end of the session the students confessed that they had already uploaded their stories and asked me if they would be able to delete them. When I told them I would have to do so for them they were dismayed and begged me "not to look at them"! For me this was the best feedback I could have wished for. The students ha...

 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...

 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...