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The Foundation Stage of the programme is for beginning English Language learners. It can also address the learning needs of older students whose readiness for English language acquisition is likely to have been affected by factors such as learning disabilities, and no prior exposure to English.
Teachers of beginner intensive English classes may find Foundation Stage an appropriate additional tool for screening students’ entry level English language and literacy skills.
Methodology
Students at Foundation Stage require specific support to achieve the literacy skills which underpin all successful reading and writing, as well as explicit support in developing their oral language in a range of domains.
It should be noted that not all outcomes from one Stage may be achieved before the student moves from one stage to the next. Some students may be working at different levels in different modes, for example, they may be working at Stage 1 in Oral Interaction, and Stage 2 in Writing.
Oral Interaction
These texts are examples of the types of oral texts that learners are required to comprehend and produce in a variety of contexts, including community contexts. At Foundation and Stage 1, they include examples of interactions necessary for communicating at school.
Link to Google Slides
Reading, Understanding and Responding
These outcomes apply to both silent reading and reading aloud, as the Teaching Components indicate. It should be remembered that silent reading is only possible when the text is at the independent reading level of the learner or when it is at instructional level and carefully supported with a variety of guided reading scaffolds, such as an advance organiser, or a set of question prompts. At Foundation and Stage 1, the Teaching Components strongly suggest a phonemic awareness programme, so that sound letter correspondences (including clusters and blends) are firmly established for both individual letters and vowel and consonant blends.
Writing
The Foundation Stage of Writing explicitly demonstrates the fundamental skills and understandings that learners will need to have established in order to begin to manage classroom learning.
There are some very simple short texts and some longer more complex texts in all strands of Stage 1. This is to allow for joint deconstruction and reconstruction of texts, alongside independent construction. The more complex texts, for example the text on Jean Batten or the text on turtles, may seem very difficult in comparison with the other Stage 1 texts. However, students can be shown how to write only one sentence under each of the text stages, but have seen a model of an expanded text. Much research on the comprehension and text production of English language learners suggests that they learn better when using more difficult texts with lots of support rather than highly simplified texts.
The Stages 1-2 then model text structures and describe language features of typical classroom tasks. There are likely to be many learners who will enter school in the primary years already competent in these skills. Diagnostic and placement assessments will determine this. The content of texts used in Stages 1-2 as writing models is, like that of the texts for Oral Interaction and Reading, drawn from a number of curriculum contexts.
The text length increases in varying degrees for Stage 2, and the complexity of the sentence structures in the Reading and Writing strands also increases. In the Oral Interaction at Stage 2, learners have to listen for detail and produce more extended oral texts.
These texts are examples of the types of oral texts that learners are required to comprehend and produce in a variety of contexts, including community contexts.
The Teaching Components at Stage 2 include drawing attention to syllabification and chunking text to promote fluent reading. In addition they encourage building understanding of prefixes, suffixes and word stems to increase word knowledge. All texts promote a focus on word, sentence and whole text analysis.
These games are designed to encourage interactive language learning. They originate from a variety of sources. Many others can be found in language learning texts, such as the Cambridge Language Education series and Oxford English: Resource Books for Teachers series. The purpose of each should be explained to students whenever the games are used, so that they are explicitly attending either to the language feature which is the focus of the game (e.g. imperative verb forms in Simon Says), or to the reading and thinking strategies (e.g. Listen Up!, which requires students to listen for the most frequent words in a text). Only the less well known and non-commercial games are listed here. The Facilitator notes to the Ministry of Education video ESOL in the mainstream, and Effective Literacy Practice in Years 1 to 4 and Effective Literacy Practice in Years 5 to 8, contain explanations of other approaches and strategies. The DVD Making Language and Learning Work: Years 5-8 also provides guidance on working with English language learners in the mainstream.
Purpose: To develop fluency in recognising word/sound correspondences and to identify main ideas in a text.
Process: Teacher prepares a list of words (about 10 at most) from a short text - about 200-250 words maximum. Students copy down the list (in a column). Teacher reads text a little more slowly than normal reading speed and students tick each word every time they hear it. At the end of the reading, count up the number of ticks for each word and this will help identify the main ideas in a text.
Purpose: To develop oral confidence and fluency and to encourage students to process information and practise generating questions.
Process: One student sits in the middle of the class or group and the others ask him/her a question about the topic, or to spell a word, or to give a fact etc. Change after each question.
Advance/Extend (not suitable for Foundation/Stage 1)
Purpose: To develop oral confidence and fluency and to develop vocabulary.
Process: Class works in pairs or small groups. Teacher allocates a topic (e.g. give a description of a dangerous animal, or a recount of a class trip to the Museum, or a retell of a film seen in class) and one student begins speaking. When the teacher calls “Extend”, the student has to elaborate on whatever word or idea they were saying at the time. For example, if they are saying “We got on the bus” and they hear “Extend” they must give more details about the bus. After about half a minute, the teacher calls “Advance” and the next student carries on with the story/ narrative/description (It must be a shared experience or text, so the next person can talk about the same thing).
Process: A small team (of 3 or 4) comes to the front of the class and one begins to retell the story; teacher points to another person (in random order) after a sentence or two and s/he has to carry on from the last word spoken. If s/he can do this without (major) hesitation, carry on. If not, s/he must “die” by dropping to the ground. Team is out when all players have “died”.
Purpose: to develop oral fluency and confidence.
Process: Teacher selects two topics (e.g. an opinion topic, or a phenomenon which has been discussed in class - How earthquakes happen/How the Solar System works. If it is an individual topic, such as - “The place I would most like to visit and why”, only one topic is needed. Students have a short time (about 5 minutes) to think about some ideas, then they have 3 minutes to talk about the topic (as a speech, with no interaction) to a partner. After 3 minutes, the other partner speaks. The students then find a new partner and give the same talk for 2 minutes, but much less hesitation and more fluency are expected. They then change partners for a third time and have only one minute to deliver the same speech. This last talk could be peer assessed against given criteria.
These grids can be factual or imaginative.
Purpose: To develop vocabulary, to prepare students for writing, to enable students to speak from another viewpoint, to assist recall and identification of main points.
Process: Make up a grid of prompts (see examples - based on Stage 2 - Narrative How Maui played with Fire and Stage 3 - Explanation Life Cycle of Ants).
Class works in small groups. Teacher numbers members from 1-3 and teacher calls out “A2” (referring to the square number), “Number 1” and Number 1 answers in the first person - e.g. (Ants) “I am a soldier ant. I am larger than the worker ants and my job is to guard the queen and the larvae and make sure that they don’t get eaten by predators.”
(also known as Grammar Dictation, Ruth Wajnryb 1990 0xford English: Resource Books for Teachers, Oxford University Press)
Purpose: to listen for main ideas, to produce an edited and accurate text.
Process: Teacher selects a passage of difficulty level relative to the class proficiency. Stage 1 might be two sentences and Stage 2 could be about three to five sentences. There should be some warm up activities before dictation and low frequency words or phrases should be written on the board and read to the class (see Wajnryb for examples of warm up activities). Teacher tells class that the purpose is to remember main ideas and recreate a grammatically accurate version of the text, not a word for word version. Teacher tells class to listen only (i.e. not write) the first time the text is read, at only slightly slower than normal pace. The second time the text is read, students individually note down main ideas as sentence fragments. They then pool notes in small groups (or pairs) and reconstruct a complete text from the fragments. They then edit this, takes turns around the group to read a sentence and share their edited version with the rest of the class and the teacher.
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