Page 93 - Teaching English at Primary Level: From Theory into the Classroom

Literacy Approaches

1. Have a discussion about an event, a story (can be in L1).
2. Determine what to write (through a brainstorming web or other organ-
isers).
3. Learners dictate the ‘story’ to the teacher, who writes it on a poster or a
board so everyone can see it. The teacher helps with the language and
reads the story step by step.
4. The teacher and the learners read the story together.
5. The teacher and the learners decide together if they want to change
anything in the story.
6. Learnerscopywhat iswritten on theboardortheposterinto theirnote-
books.

The length of the text, its difficulty lev-
el and the vocabulary used can be
adapted to the learners’ knowledge lev-
el. When the text is created, it can be
used for multiple purposes in the class-
room. The teacher can cover certain
words on the board and learners read
the whole text and guess the covered
words, he/she can copy the text from
the board and split it into different parts,
which pupils put together in the cor-
rect order or he/she asks the pupils to
point to certain words on the poster. The
text can be used in the same way as any
other text, but this time it is a person-
alised text, written by the learners, and
as such it is more memorable and more
meaningful for them. Cameron (2001)
points out that this approach can be ef- Figure 5.3 An Example of a Story Written
fectively used in the FL classroom, espe- on a Poster and Put on a
cially the idea of constructing meaning- Classroom Board (A Summary
of ‘The Very Clumsy
ful sentences linked to a variety of topics Centipede’)
and vocabulary.

Genre Approach or Text-Based Approach
The genre or text-based approach takes an authentic text as the basic princi-
ple in teaching. The rationale behind this approach is that we are surrounded
by different types of texts which conceptualise language and are a source
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