The document discusses the Language Experience Approach (LEA), a teaching method that uses students' own words and experiences to help develop reading and writing skills. It involves students dictating a story about a personal experience, which the teacher writes down. Students then read the story repeatedly. This helps reading comprehension as students are reading self-generated material. The LEA supports vocabulary growth and provides opportunities for meaningful reading and writing activities linked to students' own experiences and oral language.

1. The Language
Experience approach
Teaching English for Secondary Education
Universidad Santo Tomás
Professor Cecilia Maller A
(Based on Christy Ann Lacuesta´s PPP)

2. What is a Language Experience ?
• A strategy to develop and reinforce reading and writing
using personal experiences and student´s own
repertoire of language.
• The students themselves initiate with their own
experiences; through projects and other resulting
interactive activities.
• Ex. Going on a trip, seeing a movie,
Looking at a picture, etc.

3. Language Experience : A Method
• Language experience approach is a method actually uses
students own words to help them read.
Your student may draw a picture of Dad in a car. In that
case you would write underneath the drawing; Dad is in the
car.
You continue to collect drawings your students makes and
write a short sentence underneath each drawing. A picture of
a playground would read. We went to the playground.

4. When you’ve collected enough pictures you make them into
a book for your students to read again and again. Write
underneath the drawing a description your student gives for
drawing. This way your student will remember much better
what is written.
First you will write every word and sentence. Slowly your
student will begin to trace over the words you have written
and finally the student will write the words and sentences
alone.

5. • Some people use this method as a first approach to
reading in order to help their student understand that
what they’ve drawn and what you have written is a
form of communication between the student and
yourself.
• The Language experience approach supports learner’s
concept development and vocabulary growth while
offering many opportunities for meaningful reading and
writing activities through the use of personal
experiences and oral language.

6. Language Experience: A Teaching Approach
Personal Experience
( Dewey,1938)
Literacy Instruction
( Huey,1908)
Introduction
Language Experience Approach
Community Literacy
(Higgins,1995)
Service Learning
( Herzberg,1994)

7. How it works: 5 steps
1. Teacher and student discuss the topic to be the focus on the
1
dictation. Observations and opinions are exchanged.
Oral Language skills are developed and reinforced.
2. The Students dictates an account or story to the
T, who records the statements to construct the
basic reading materials

8. 3. The SS read the story several times until the story has
become quite familiar. Reading comprehension is made easier
by the fact that the student is reading material that is self
generated
4. Individual story words are learned, the
other reading skills are reinforced through
teacher-designed activities related to the
story

9. 5. Students move from reading their own dictation
to reading other-author materials as they develop
confidence and skill with reading process

10. Theoretical Support
• Based on several key language learning principles

11. 1. Learning occurs from
the known to unknown
2.Learning occurs most
effectively in general to
specific direction
3.Struggling adult readers
usually have a low self-concept
as readers and
need to be assured of
some immediate success
4. Everyone reads at every
LEA session

12. Speaking
Four
Skills
writing
Grammatical
skills
LANGUAGE
reading

13. HOW C AN WE MOST EFFECTIVELY ADAPT
THE LEA?
• Providing all the input for sometime and taking the heat off the
student ( Wales,1994,p.203)
• Advocates the use of picture or word cues to initiate and
contextualize topics of conversation (Ringel,1989)
• Cooperative Learning

14. LEA follow-up lessons on:
•Grammar
•Lexicon
•Pronunciation
•spelling

15. The LEA
Although there is no one “super method”
for language teaching, LEA offers a:
useful and effective method for beginning
literacy instruction .
How?
by linking the students’ language and
experience in learning

16. • Language experience encourages students to:
explore, think and talk.
This talk, during and after the language
experience provides:
*many opportunities to expand students’
vocabulary,
*extend their knowledge of grammar, and
*scaffold their interactions.

17. • Language experience activities also help to
provide a bank of experiences that
students have in common.
• These can be recalled and referred to in
subsequent learning.

18. • Language experience activities are often
related to current topics or to students’ own
lives. They can be particularly effective when
linked to a specific text.
Examples:
●visiting the supermarket after reading
Finding Mum to find the items in the story
and making a meal out of the ingredients.
●using skype to talk to students in another
school before or after reading Talking to
Nanny.

19. The role of the TEACHER
• to model the writing and the thinking aloud process;
• to develop writing skills and introduce different writing genres
through mini-lessons;
• to promote rereading as a strategy for students to remember what
they are writing about;
• to develop purpose of writing and writing for an audience;
• to demonstrate appropriate writing conventions.

20. Observers will see:
• students and teacher thinking aloud about their experience
while writing about it;
• the teacher modeling the translation of students’ signs into an
appropriate written version;
• students rereading what they have dictated
• Students documenting their language experience through
pictures and written compositions

21. How to record language experience:
• Ask students to sign what they are learning.
• Act as a scribe and write in English what is signed.
• Sign back to the students to make sure they agree with
the story that was written down.
• “Think aloud” to demonstrate processes to students.

22. • Relate the complexity of the text to the language
level of the students.
• Let the students contribute drawings or other art
to enhance the writings.
• Use mini lessons to focus on specific language or
reading skills.

23. Hope you enjoyed today´s class

24. REFERENCES
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Collaborative learning: Higher education, interdependence, and the authority of
knowledge. London: John Hopkins UP.
Bruner, J. S. (1983).
In search of mind: Essays in autobiography. NY: Harper.
Caplan, M. (1989).
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Dewey, J. (1938).
Experience and education: The Kappa Delta Pi lecture. New York: Macmillan.
Dixon, C. N., & Nessel, D. D. (1983).
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25. Herzberg, B. (1994). Community service and critical teaching. College
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Huey, E. B. (1908). The psychology and pedagogy of reading. New York:
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Peck, W., Flower, L., & Higgins, L. (1995). Community literacy. College composition and
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Richard, Patricia(2003). Making it happen, From Interactive to Participatory Language Teaching.
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Spinner, J. (1997, March 13) Columnist’s criticism of composition courses inaccurate,
wrongheaded. Arizona Daily Wildcat, p. 4

26. Stauffer, R. G. (1980). The language experience approach to the teaching of
reading. NY: Harper & Row.
Wales, M. L. (1994). A language experience approach (LEA) in adult
immigrant literacy programs in Australia. Journal of Reading, 38, 200-208.
Wurr, A. J. & Rutkin, T. J. (1998). The language experience approach: Linking
experience and education for adult L2 learners. Shimonoseki Municipal
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