Language Experience Approach (LEA)

How to use the Language Experience Approach?

1. The class does a teacher-planned activity, such as:

   • Watching a video clip

   • Taking a walk around the school

   • Making a simple musical instrument

   • Doing a science experiment

   • Creating a piece of art

   • Going on a field trip

   • Playing a board game

   • Creating a toy or puppet

   • Preparing a food

   • Playing frisbee, soccer, or basketball

   • Performing a dance

   • Working in a school garden

   • Inventing and performing a play 

   • Any activity where the students are having the same experience!

2. Immediately following the activity, students are given a short time to write down notes about what they did (beginners can draw). Then, the teacher calls on students to share what the class did. The teacher then writes down what is said on the smart board or poster paper for the class. 

• It is sometimes debated if the teacher should write down exactly what a student says if there are grammar or word errors or if the teacher should say it back to the student and write it down correctly.

3. The class can chorally repeat each sentence after the teacher reads it aloud. Students can copy down sentences and can add their own illustrations. Because the text develops from their own experience, it is much more accessible because they already know its meaning. Instead of doing an activity, it is also possible to use common experiences already shared by all students in the class - for example, a folktale that might be known if all students come from the same home culture, a popular movie that everyone has seen, a major world event, or even what has happened in class that day.

4. The text can subsequently be used for different follow up activities, including:

• A cloze (removing certain words and leaving blanks that students have to complete)

• A sentence scramble (taking individual sentences and mixing up the words for learners to sequence)

• Mixing up all the sentences in the text and having students put them in order

• Read aloud with partners

• Illustrate a sentence and read it aloud to the class

• Create categories for words in the sentences (nouns, verbs, words that begin with "r," etc.)

• Grammar lessons (can be taught during the original sentence writing or after)

• Students with higher proficiencies can be asked to add more sentences on their own

• The possibilities are endless!

Resources

The Language Experience Approach (LEA) is a strategy that can be found in The ELL Teacher's Toolbox by Larry Ferlazzo and Katie Hull Sypnieski!