In the 19th century writing was a rare gift. In Germany only in churches you could learn reading and writing in Latin. To write and read in German was not imported because these skills were only used for the reading and understanding of the Bible, which was in Latin written.
Nowadays, the relationship between illiteracy, social alienation, and poverty is too acute to ignore. Pauline Gibbons discusses in chapter 4 and 5 some difficulties that ESL students may have in learning to write in English. She suggests a teaching cycle that models and makes explicit some of the major forms of writing in school.
The Curriculum Cycle explain how ESL teachers can apply “Explicit teaching” in classroom.
In the first stage, the teacher has to build the field. This means that the teacher should give enough background knowledge about this topic. In this stage the students could read, listen or write about the topic. For example, when the topic is “A trip to Washington DC” the teacher has to explain that this is the Capitol of the
USA. The teacher can ask some questions and show pictures of the White House and Pentagon. After the ESL teacher wrote down the vocabulary, for example, government, president, capitol, politics first lady, the class can watch a short documentary about the president and his family.
In the next stage the teacher and students can write a letter to the President. They can write the needs of their school. For example, new tables and more teachers. In this stage the teacher can explain grammatical rules or sentence structure.
As homework the students can write a letter with their own wishes to the President. By the last stage the student have developed background knowledge about the topic and they also learned linguistic characteristics of the text type.
The teacher can get important information about the background of the student. The teacher should ask themselves what the text is telling her/him.
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