Low-Literacy ESOL Basics: An Intro to LEA

The Language Experience Approach is a flexible, effective, and kind approach to literacy development. I know it’s uncommon to call a teaching approach kind, sweet, warm, etc. but when you see how it works, you’ll see what I mean - it puts a lot of faith in the students and clearly values the knowledge and experiences that they’re bringing to the table. The very poetic underlying assumptions are the following (Roach Van Allen, from Wikipedia):

• What I can say, I can write
• ​What I can write, I can read
  
• I can read what I write and what other people can write for me to read.
  

The core practice that I focus on in the Language Experience Approach (LEA) is that students share an experience, they describe that experience to the teacher, the teacher writes it down, and then this text is used for a variety of literacy development activities. What does this accomplish?
The learners’ thoughts and experiences are centered in the class.

• You know the students understand the ideas in the text because they were the ones who came up with them.
• The teacher provides crucial support while also letting the learners express themselves.
• It helps the learners see the connection between their spoken words and the written text.

It’s flexible:

• What is the experience? You can use a variety of starting points for the “experience” that students will describe. A class trip to an everyday place (e.g. a supermarket, the library, a hardware store, etc.), students can talk about a place that they are all familiar with, or they can look at a picture story (see Pathway to Literacy for great picture story materials) and talk about what they see. The crucial thing is that everybody is familiar with the thing that the class is talking about so that they can contribute and they understand the meaning of the text.
• For low-literacy learners, you can write exactly what the students say when they’re telling you about the experience so that the connection between the spoken word and the written word is as clear as possible. The other benefit of this is that students won’t be distracted by any changes that you make (e.g. wondering why you changed something, remembering a grammar rule, etc.).
• For literate learners, on the other hand, you can make minor corrections to the students’ description as you write it down. The benefit of this is that it models the correct grammar, and maybe even highlights it if that’s the point of your lesson (see this video for an example). This may not strictly be LEA, but I believe that it is a continuation of the principles and the techniques of the approach.
• For high-level learners (e.g. GED students), who are struggling with a blank page, the teacher can elicit the students’ thoughts on a topic (e.g. pros and cons of AI in education), and write what the learners say. That way, the learners get their ideas on paper, and they see that the blank page doesn’t have to be so scary. By writing what they say, you can show them that their thoughts have value and, as a result, they’re not starting from zero.
  

To see it in action, check out my LEA playlist. There are examples of LEA with individual learners who are working on native language literacy and other examples with groups of ESOL learners. A few notes

• “How much are the peppers?” focuses on the lead up to a class trip that would later be used as the experience for LEA.
• “CCRS in the ABE classroom: Literacy Level ESL” uses a picture story for the shared experience.
• “Building Literacy with Adult Emergent Readers” focuses on a class that took place after a few classes of preparation: 1. The teacher found out that the students were having problems in their apartments. 2. The class prepped for and took a trip to a hardware store to get solutions to the problems students had mentioned (i.e. bedbugs, roaches, etc.). 3. The class went over the trip using LEA. 4. The class does a number of activities to practice what they learned in step 3 (this is the class shown in the video).