I hope this blog finds you well! This is the fourth installment of my Literacy Improvement Series as related to the English side of a Two-Way Immersion Program. However, I hope you know that these strategies can be adapted for teaching and learning in any language – or in a monolingual English class as well! See my past blogs on Oracy Development, Vocabulary, and Phonics for more ideas.

I’m so excited to share one of my favorite strategies with you today: The Language Experience Approach (LEA). Let me see if I can convince you to put this strategy on your list of “must-dos” within each unit you develop for your students.

Reasons Why the LEA is the MOST AWESOME Strategy Ever:

1. You can use LEA at just about any time during your unit. You just need a shared activity for the students to experience and react to.
2. LEA is a perfect way for your students to make a connection between oral language and written language.
3. You can adapt LEA to fit ANY grade level.
4. LEA gives an authentic outlet for teaching sentence structure, formal language, paragraph structure, organization, grammar, conventions, voice, various writing genres, revision/editing, and so much more, all while using the students’ ideas around their shared experience.
5. The LEA can easily be extended into differentiated writing work.
6. Your final LEA result can then be used in Guided Reading, small groups, or individual work for practice with reading fluency and expression.

Now that I’ve convinced you that this strategy is worth its weight in gold (right?), let me share an example of how I used it with my first grade English class recently.

The Language Experience Approach begins with a shared experience. This can be a concept attainment activity where students build oral academic language and background knowledge through a concrete activity (see Teaching for Biliteracy pages 52-56 for more), it can be a field trip, or it can be done toward the end of a unit of study when students have had many interactions with content and vocabulary.

In my classes, I use a combination of suggestions from Beeman and Urow from throughout Teaching for Biliteracy (pages 57-59 have a classroom example; pages 104-106 break it down for various grade levels) along with formatting and ideas from the Cooperative Strip Paragraph from my training in Guided Language Acquisition Design (GLAD).

Table 8.1 is taken directly from Beeman and Urow’s Teaching for Biliteracy text – page 105. It shows some great examples of how LEA can look at different grade levels.

My first graders recently used the LEA to write a narrative. As a culmination to our Communities unit in social studies, we used the LEA to coauthor a fiction tale based off of the Town Mouse and the Country Mouse. Our tale: The Suburban Mouse!

We wrote the introductory paragraph together. The students generated the ideas, I was the scribe.

Here is the intro paragraph we wrote together. I took the students’ ideas exactly as they spoke them. We later edited for grammar.

After the intro paragraph was written, the students’ task was to write one thing that they thought the suburban mouse would do with his cousins his suburban community. This made them think about what a suburban community would offer (tied to our social studies standards on community) and how that would relate to our story. Now I had an informal assessment for me to see whether they were differentiating between the communities.

A student writing his idea about what the suburban mouse might do with his cousins.

Then we compiled the sentence strip ideas. While we read the ideas, they were quick to comment: “That doesn’t make sense,” or “It wouldn’t sound right if we put that first; let’s move that sentence.” They worked together to decide the order of the sentences and weed out the repeated ideas.

Here we put all of the sentences together that were about the mice taking a walk. We then talked about how to combine them or change them to have a better flow. (Clearly I need a minilesson on the /oo/ in took!)

We often need to break this up over several days. It requires a lot of brain power! But throughout the process I sprinkle them with language and writing minilessons. We work on adding topic and closing sentences as needed. In first grade we talk about quotation marks around dialogue and using transition words between ideas. We read it over and over and over again to listen for voice.

This is how the “walk” section evolved.

There are always arguments, and I love it. For some, the story did not end up the way they wanted it to.

Me: “We started this story together and it has all of our ideas. But now you can make it JUST YOURS. Continue with revision to make this story what you want it to be!”

Each student gets a copy of a well-spaced, typed version of the coauthored story and access to as many blank pages as they would like. They are allowed to cut apart the story however they would like, add or change the story, put it together, add a title, and illustrate. Some choose to keep the story just as we wrote it as a class, some choose to make significant changes. In the end, every student has a story that he/she authored, illustrated, and CAN READ independently.

Covers

Student sample of how the story went together with illustrations.

A different student sample.

We then read our stories to each other, the kindergartners, and anyone else who will listen! They are so proud of their stories, and they have no idea how much they learned in the process.

LEA has the power to transform writing in your classroom. Watch then how your students begin to apply the lessons they learned through LEA into their journal writing and independent writing assignments!

How would you use LEA with your grade level? I’d love to hear your ideas and thoughts on adapting it in various ways. In early July will post an example of how I used it with my kindergarten class toward the end of this school year, then I will wrap up my Literacy Improvement Series mid-July with The Myth of the Literacy Block. I figure it’s a good topic for summer as you may be examining your units and decide how to fit it all in. Come back in July for some ideas on how to plan more efficiently.

Happy summer, everyone!

Reference

Beeman, K. & Urow, C. (2013). Teaching for Biliteracy: Strengthening Bridges between Languages. Philadelphia, PA: Caslon Publishing.