Emerging Worlds: The Participatory ESOL Planning Project

Paper 4: Literacy Becky Winstanley Melanie Cooke

Emerging Worlds: Introduction

Becky Winstanley and Melanie Cooke

Emerging Worlds is a series of five papers based on the findings and observations of the Participatory ESOL Planning Project (PEP), an action research project which took place between October 2010 and April 2011. The project was originally funded by Reflect ESOL which was set up by the organisation Action Aid in 2004. More information on Reflect ESOL can be found in Moon and Sunderland (2008) and at http://www.reflectaction.org/reflectesol. The project documented how a group of ESOL teachers planned their lessons whilst teaching a course using participatory planning methods and techniques

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The core team were: Becky Winstanley; Elaine Williamson; Alice Robson; Rebecca

The main aims were: 

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To explore ‘emerging’ schemes of work as an alternative to traditional ESOL schemes of work. To understand teachers’ and students’ experiences of this way of planning.

The project group consisted of seven ESOL teachers working in colleges and adult education centres in London1. In writing the papers, as well as the experiences of the core team we have also drawn on the contributions of other practitioners we have met in training sessions who have added valuable insights about their experience of using participatory methods to teach ESOL.

Galbraith; Katy Guttman; Rebecca Durand; Joanna Williams.

Participatory ESOL Participatory approaches to ESOL draw on the theoretical work of the Brazilian Marxist Paulo Freire (1970) and other scholars who have adapted his teachings for ESOL such as Elsa Auerbach and Nina Wallerstein (2005). Freire emphasised the importance of dialogue and enquiry in education and stressed that rather than being mere recipients of facts and figures transmitted by the teacher, students should play a central role in the production of knowledge; one of the fundamental principles of participatory curricula is that the driving force behind the curriculum is the concerns and issues which affect students in their daily lives. As Elsa Auerbach (1992: 19) puts it, the direction of the instructional process is ‘from the students to the curriculum rather than from the curriculum to the students’. Participatory ESOL also incorporates political critique of the social divisions and inequality of society as well as of authoritarian or hierarchical educational models that fail to challenge – or even perpetuate – this inequality. Participatory approaches involve reflection on the material conditions of learner’s lives and experiences and, where appropriate, involve students in action to effect change. Participatory approaches to ESOL have become more widespread in the UK over the last 10 years. Influential in this regard is the work done by the development charity ActionAid from 2005-2011. ActionAid’s educational programme Reflect and its corresponding ESOL programme Reflect ESOL developed the use of participatory research tools to develop language skills alongside an overtly political ethos of action and social change. Individual practitioners have increasingly adopted participatory approaches in their ESOL teaching whilst organisations such as English for Action, which specifically organises its ESOL courses around campaigning for change, have developed this work and taken it forward. Some organisations have incorporated language work into existing campaigns or workplace struggles; for example, Justice for Domestic Workers and Xtalk, a collective of migrant sex workers.

The PEP project: methodology Working with emerging topics and language and literacy turns the traditional approach to planning on its head; while teachers might sometimes be able to predict what the concerns and language needs of students are ahead of meeting them, it is only through collaborative investigation and the ongoing process of classroom interaction that they can really find this out. Therefore, the PEP team agreed to abandon the standard pre-determined, pre-written SoW and explore instead approaches which allowed teachers to respond to the language and topics which emerged in class. By way of a structure for our research we decided on three areas to focus and reflect upon while exploring our emerging schemes of work. These were used by most of the teachers in the project and served as a basis for our ongoing discussions. The three areas were: 1. Emerging topics (what are they and how do they arise?) 2. Emerging language and literacy (what language emerges? How does it emerge?) 3. Emerging action (e.g. changes compared to the start of the course; any shifts in power; any social, political, community action taken?)

The data consisted of any or all of the following:

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Ongoing reflections on the process. These were produced in the form of notes and journals which were brought along for discussion at project meetings or for reflective interviews. Materials produced in class which showed where language, literacy and topics had emerged Tools which were used to discuss a particular topic Photos of classroom activities and materials/visuals Lesson plans which linked together and showed the ongoing, emerging SoW as it was produced Transcripts (or paraphrasing) of classroom discussions: these showed either emerging language or topics, or students’ reactions and comments on the process itself Other materials, e.g. student writing

The five papers in the Emerging Worlds series, which can be read together but also stand alone, are as follows:

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Paper 1: Planning for Participatory ESOL Paper 2: Emerging themes and topics Paper 3: Emerging language Paper 4: Emerging literacy Paper 5: Students as evaluators.

The papers are offered as ‘works in progress’ and we welcome any comments and suggestions which readers would like to make: Melanie Cooke: [email protected] Becky Winstanley: [email protected]

Emerging Worlds Paper 4: Literacy

Emerging Worlds Paper 4: Literacy This paper is about literacy development in a Participatory ESOL class. It focuses on one group of students on an Entry 3 ESOL literacy course which was taught by the authors, Becky Winstanley and Melanie Cooke.

Introduction: literacy development in ESOL There are various ways teachers plan for literacy development on a traditional preplanned scheme of work. These include process writing, developing knowledge of genres or text types, developing sub-skills (such as reading for gist, scanning, writing complex sentences etc.) and elements of language at the level of grammar, spelling, phonics and word formation. Texts may be chosen because they exemplify a particular text type, because they target vocabulary and grammatical structures, because they fit in content-wise with a particular topic or because they might be useful for sparking off a discussion. In addition, some schemes of work need to address the literacy requirements of an external exam or of a particular curriculum such as ‘employability’ or vocationally oriented courses. Whilst it is probably the case – for various reasons – that teachers tend to focus on the ‘basics’ in literacy development, i.e. sentence and word level skills, the designers of the Adult ESOL Core Curriculum (AECC) acknowledged the importance of working with whole texts. The AECC divides language into three ‘layers’: ‘text’, ‘sentence’ and ‘word’, the principle being that learners are developing all these simultaneously from the earliest stages. The AECC drew quite heavily on theories which highlight the importance of acquiring

commonly-occurring text types. We agree that mastery and control of particular genres and discourses are necessary if people are to be able to participate equally in society and if they are to claim the power held by those who control access to ‘powerful literacies’ such as academic literacy, school literacy, Standard English and so on. As these genres are generally hidden from those excluded from them they need to be taught explicitly (see e.g. Cope and Kalantzis 1993). However, if genres and texts are chosen in advance of knowing those which students require or need – or think they will need in the future – we are still left with the problem that a pre-written scheme of work does not and cannot be truly student-centred and relevant to real life concerns and needs. The impact of Participatory ESOL approaches on literacy development In the participatory approach to literacy development the genres and sub-skills which students learn and which emerge during a course of study are not necessarily different to those outlined in the core curriculum or in some commercially or practitioner-produced text books and materials. Many of the text types which students read and wrote on our course were similar to those which might find their way onto a pre-written scheme of work, e.g. newspaper articles, posters, leaflets, college texts and so on. However, as we show later, as the course progressed a need arose for text types which were unlikely to appear on most traditional SoWs. Similarly, our students were all concerned with the difficulties of the English spelling system and with achieving a good level of accuracy at sentence level.

Emerging Worlds Paper 4: Literacy

Having said this, though, we wish to highlight in this paper several differences between our approach and the traditional approaches to literacy development which we believe to be fundamental: the first is the impact of the Participatory ESOL process on literacy teaching and learning and the second is the question of how we addressed the literacy learning needs which arose from students’ real-life concerns, in particular those that emerged over a series of weeks in which students became involved in a campaign in defence of ESOL funding.

 texts were not brought into a lesson before a theme had emerged from students’ own concerns, but rather once the theme has been established. The text ‘followed’ and supplemented themes rather than the other way round.  a text was not given to students until quite a lot of analytic work had been done on the themes and issues surrounding the text  much more time was spent on one text than would ordinarily be seen in a traditional ESOL class

In traditional language teaching it is quite common for a text to be the central focus of a lesson, i.e. the teacher will bring along a reading, which she has chosen in advance, which provides practice in one or more of the sub-skills of reading (e.g. skimming, scanning, reading for gist, reading for detail and so on) and which might also provide a topic for further discussion, as a prompt for language work or perhaps a springboard for writing.

There was also a high level of collaborative reading and writing work done in our class, meaning that students were able to teach and learn from each other and even people with low literacy levels could contribute to the reading and writing of whole texts about complex contemporary issues. One of the most important observations we made during this project is the fact that students were reading texts at a far higher level than we would ordinarily have predicted at Entry Level 2/3. The texts they read included lexical items and grammatical structures which were far above their designated ‘level’, as the following discussion about a series of lessons shows.

Texts might be dealt with through a series of pedagogic strategies such as ‘pre-reading’ activities which might include brainstorming what people know about the topic, or preteaching difficult words, or predicting what might be coming up in the text and so on. Post-reading activities might include a discussion about themes arising from the text or some kind of language-focused exercise. There are similar approaches to writing: teachers might get students to brainstorm ideas, draft together, follow models, read each other’s work and so on. On our course we made use of many of these pedagogic strategies. However, there were several fundamental differences between our approach and a more traditional approach to the development of reading and writing:

The ‘immigration laws’ lessons This activity took place near the beginning of the course and spanned three sessions. The topic which had emerged – proposed changes to immigration law which would introduce language testing for spouses prior to entry to the UK - was one which was in the news and which several students felt strongly about. The students had brought up the issue on various occasions and it seemed the topic was of sufficient interest to delve a bit deeper. To this end we adapted two texts about the new laws, one adapted from The Guardian newspaper, the other a personal account of

Emerging Worlds Paper 4: Literacy

how the law was going to affect one individual. The first step was to ask students to brainstorm their existing knowledge about immigration law and to establish what they knew about the proposed new legislation. This provoked such an animated discussion that in our field notes we wrote ‘the class is igniting!’ The students also talked about other parts of the law which we, the teachers, had been ignorant about, such as the fact that along with a language test, a lower age limit was to be imposed on prospective spouses. One of the trees is shown in Example 1: Example 1: the immigration tree

Thus, long before any texts were introduced, students had a high level of interest and engagement in the topic and therefore, we would suggest, much higher motivation when it came to reading around the issue later on. The next step was to develop the theme using a visual tool (a tree) the first time the students had been asked to work in this way. To produce their trees, the students had to discuss together the reasons why the government was bringing in this new law (the roots) and the possible consequences (the branches).

Emerging Worlds Paper 4: Literacy

This stage was important because it provided a way for students to access what they know about an issue and to think about it analytically and critically. The tree also provided an essential link between the spoken and written word which Freire argued is essential for literacy development: in order to produce the tree collaboratively students had to negotiate ideas, justify opinions and check facts with each other and with the facilitators, going deep into the ‘world’ of the words as Freire (1970) put it. The graphic representation of students’ analysis of the issues subsequently became their own text which they ‘read’ i.e. interpreted to the other groups and to us. We felt this stage was significant for two reasons: firstly it allowed people who find writing a challenge to put down on paper highly complex ideas – many of which were in fact more complex than those they finally met when they read the texts about the new law. Secondly, this mix of oral, written and graphic work is representative of the way in which many ‘literacy events’ actually take place in the everyday world; from ethnographic research (see e.g. Barton 2006, Hamilton, Barton and Ivanič 1994) we know that literacy is not always – or even usually – practised by an individual in a room alone and that reading and writing is mixed up with other activities in which there is frequently a lot of talk and discussion around texts. In this way, we are able to draw on naturally occurring literacy practices which students are likely to be familiar with, thus linking more

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For more on Freirean problem posing in ESOL see Bryers, Winstanley and Cooke (2013)

holistically their existing practices with classroom-based literacy. The next step was to do some follow up language work with the themes emerging from the tree. In this stage students were offered some grammatical forms to help structure their statements. They also engaged in more discussion which provided new material for their tree/text. Here are some of the reflections we wrote about this stage after the class: ‘All gathered round one table. We introduced two new verbs, ‘introduce’ and ‘bring in’ and wrote them on cards and stuck them on the roots of the tree. We used them to create sentences beginning ‘the Government is going to bring in /introduce new immigration laws because…’ I had planned to get students to practise this as a longer sentence using the tree as information. Some students did this and did it really well – but the sentences just served to spark more debate! so not all students had a go at the longer sentence. This was really quite exciting as loads more ideas came out.’ In example 2 we give a flavour of the debate which was sparked by the language work. In it we see examples of problem posing questions by the teacher2 and of the range of opinions encompassed in the discussions, just as would be the case in any discussion about complex themes; some of the students draw on conservative discourses (measures are needed because of overcrowding) whilst others draw on critical discourses which recognise the role of the economy and imperialism:

Emerging Worlds Paper 4: Literacy

Example 2: debating immigration S1: The government is going to introduce the new law because they want to improve education. T: Do you think that’s true? S2: No, if the government want to improve education, they don’t cut classes or teachers’ pay. They don’t cut ESOL classes. S3: the government have brought in new immigration measures because there is overcrowding in this country. T: But British people go and live in other countries. Ss: yeah, Australia, New Zealand, Egypt, S1: yeah, why don’t British people coming to Morocco learn Arabic ? S4: because they rule the world, innit. 200 years in India! S2: this is rich people’s law. S5: yes now they say they no want pensioners. Because pensioners make no money. They only want people who can make money because recession. S6: mmm I didn’t watch news for a long time. I didn’t know. The next stage was the introduction of two texts about the new laws: Text 1, adapted from The Guardian newspaper, was a report about the new proposals while Text 2 was a personal account from the internet by a young woman who was being directly affected by the new legislation. Prior to reading these texts students were asked to predict what they might expect to find in both. This provided a sensitisation towards the different features of each text and how these vary according to genre, purpose and audience. Students were then invited to select a text to read and did so in pairs. This was followed by several comprehension exercises. The long, intensive period of thinking and oral work around the arguments and debates meant that when students came to read the texts they found them relatively accessible, despite some of the grammatical complexity and lexical density in the articles. In the following two lessons students returned to these texts and continued working on them, all the time adding new roots and branches to their trees. At the beginning of

the second lesson they were asked to create mind maps of the texts they had read and present these to each other, and then they were invited to read the text they hadn’t read the week before. In her reflections after the second class we wrote: ‘Quite high level skills required, and difficult texts. Students needed support with texts but were able to engage fully with texts working collaboratively. Two groups did excellent presentations. Ideas around the topic steadily becoming more complex. The depth of discussion helping students to help each other to understand and talk about the issues.’ One of the most striking things we observed was that students worked with just one theme and two texts (above). Students returned to the texts many times across three lessons and the texts became interwoven with other classroom work which fused together literacy and oral work as the theme developed and the issues became more complex. On several occasions students had debates about the issues arising from the theme,

Emerging Worlds Paper 4: Literacy

which led to some further metalinguistic work on the development of discussion skills themselves (see Emerging Worlds Paper 3 for more on this). In this way we linked the argumentation found in written texts with those needed for oral debate and successful discussion – and so the work went on, in a loop in which students constantly analysed, re-assessed and extended their ideas and produced and recycled new words and grammatical forms. At the end of this series of lessons, when the theme was finally drawing to a close, there was a whole group discussion in which students debated all the issues which had emerged during the last three lessons: this enabled us, the teachers, to observe how their ideas had deepened since the first brainstorm and how their discussion skills were becoming honed – further evidence, to us, that oracy and literacy are intimately connected and working with texts in the way that we did impacted positively on students’ speaking skills and vice-versa. We also observed that students were already becoming more autonomous and were having debates and discussions about the issues arising and were listening attentively to each other’s opinions. As teachers we were in fact sidelined in this debate which took place

almost entirely amongst the students themselves. The ‘ESOL cuts’ lessons In the next example we offer a description of a series of texts produced by students over several weeks in the spring of 2011 as they got involved in a campaign against cuts to ESOL funding. In 2011 one of the burning issues in one class was government cuts to public services – in particular the threat to ESOL funding which erupted in January. Out of this topic emerged a series of lessons and activities in which students analysed the causes and effects of the cuts using visual tools to encourage analytic thinking and engaging with media texts and videos, including some which featured protests held by ESOL students in different parts of the country. After a few weeks they decided they themselves wished to take action and spent some time discussing forms of protest. The photo below shows the tool which the students used to do this: the arrows represent pressure being applied to the government and the size of the arrows represent how effective the students considered each one to be.

Emerging Worlds Paper 4: Literacy

Example 3: Forms of protest

Finally the students decided to join with another class and set up a student meeting at the college; importantly, the role of the teachers during this time was limited to supporting the students with the language they needed to produce the discourses and texts as these arose; we took no part in the actual meeting itself nor had a say on how it

should be organised. The first step in the whole process was to produce an action plan which gave an idea in visual form of everything which needed to be done to set up the meeting.

This is shown in Example 4:

Emerging Worlds Paper 4: Literacy

Example 4: planning a meeting

Emerging Worlds Paper 4: Literacy

From this plan a range of language and literacy work emerged as students went through the different phases of organising and evaluating the meeting. By way of illustration of the discourses and text types students worked with we provide here two Speaking and listening  Chairing a meeting: for this, students had to discuss who would be best for the role and also what the role involved and the kind of language a chair would need to use to maintain order and so on. 

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Making a speech: students needed to consider the features of making speeches, either formally or as short interventions in a meeting. They discussed issues such as length, capturing and holding attention of listeners, and rhetorical strategies such as repetition, using examples and so on. Giving information: students agreed it was important to be as informed as possible and to be able to give information to people who perhaps knew less than they did; this was naturally linked to reading for information from various sources.

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Getting a turn at a meeting: the students expressed their anxiety about getting a chance to speak. This led to a discussion about turn-taking and other discourse strategies and also to the difference between turn-taking in a chaired meeting and in informal interaction.

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Telling your story: students agreed that personal testimony was a powerful way to get your point across and

lists. We have divided the activities into speaking-listening and reading-writing although, as we discuss above, these invariably involved a mixture of both spoken and written language.

persuade others of your point of view. This therefore involved work on producing narratives in a vivid way which captured the attention of the listeners. 

Persuading people about your point of view: students discussed the most effective ways of doing this in a meeting situation, i.e. by using argumentation strategies such as giving examples to illustrate a point, explaining the flaws in the government’s own arguments and pointing to the long term consequences of the cuts.

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Coming to decisions in a group and dealing with differences in opinion: this involved discussing questions of listening to diverse points of view and the need to compromise, as well as on the role of the chair/moderator.

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Giving an interview: towards the end of the course, the students were interviewed by Rebecca Galbraith for the journal Post-16 Educator (Galbraith 2011). This was intimately linked to the written work students did after the meeting (see below) and provided an opportunity for the students to recap and display their thinking and analysis of the themes surrounding the cuts.

Emerging Worlds Paper 4: Literacy

Literacy work/text types The literacy work began with students becoming properly informed about the facts and causes of the cuts by reading texts from newspapers and the Internet. For each text type which emerged subsequently, students discussed the format of the text, the information which needed to be included, in which order it needed to appear and how it was to be disseminated. For each text type students worked collaboratively in small groups, sometimes working on separate sections of the text and sometimes working all together. The texts and writing activities which emerged we as follows:

Example 5: producing a newsletter

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making notes and summarising information (see above) making a poster about the meeting writing an agenda for the meeting making a list of contacts writing minutes writing a newsletter about the meeting for other students at the college.

The newsletter consisted of three paragraphs headed: what is happening to ESOL? What have students at the college been doing about the cuts? And what will we do next? The text was written collaboratively by three groups, each one working on a separate paragraph, as the photos in Example 5 demonstrate:

Emerging Worlds Paper 4: Literacy

Paragraph 1 what is happening to ESOL? mind map

Para. 2 What have students been doing?

Para. 3 What will we do next? Finally, the newsletter was disseminated around the college to other students, another meeting was organised and so the activities continued, stretching outside the local vicinity as some students continued their involvement

in the campaign, attending a workshop on how to organise politically and a national demonstration against ESOL cuts.

Emerging Worlds Paper 4: Literacy

Reflections There are several observations we would like to make about the work done around the campaign against ESOL cuts. The first is that the students were completely engaged with this issue, which directly affected them and which was causing a lot of them real stress and anxiety. Rather than create a purpose for reading and writing, the purpose arose from a real-life urgent need. We would argue that this had a direct effect on the texts which students produced and the way they produced them. The texts had to be produced quickly and they had to be readable and accessible to a range of readers. Rather than get bogged down with spelling and grammar as students had often been in the past we noticed towards the end of the series of lessons that these concerns had taken a back seat – but that in fact their writing was more accurate than before. In our field notes we wrote: They readily took to the writing activity, worked completely collaboratively, hardly asked for any help expect the odd spelling… They seem to be letting go of the spelling obsession, maybe because of the high level of engagement they had with the task? Another important observation we made is that most of the texts which emerged during student involvement in the ESOL cuts campaign are unlikely to have made their way onto a traditional pre-written Entry 3 scheme of work. However, all of the work involved language and literacy with real uses and purposes both inside and outside the classroom – and thus, we would argue, examples of genuinely useful literacy which is transportable to other domains and uses in the outside world.

In fact, one of the intriguing things for us as teachers was the fact that we, as activists in the Action for ESOL campaign, were ourselves learning and practising the very same discourses, genres and text types as our students as we planned and attended meetings, wrote reports and tried to persuade others of the campaign’s point of view. Finally, as well as developing competence in useful text types such as minutes and newsletters students began to develop their own ‘poetic’ voices and modes of expression in English when talking about issues that affected them. Students began to use their own images to describe their opinions and feelings about the cuts: one talked several times of learning bringing light to darkness whilst another, in the interview given to Rebecca Galbraith, described the cuts like this: ‘if you try to stop a flooding river with a small jug it does not work. They are cutting small things, like teachers, like ESOL. This is not going to do anything, this does not fix it.’ Towards the end of the course, students produced poems, two of which we reproduce here: ESOL cuts are like a big strong punch They sound like a fox scream They smell like stale fish They taste like out of date milk They feel like a stone (Fatima ESOL student)

ESOL cuts are like a big storm They sound like a stranger They smell like stale blood They taste like perfume They feel like a very hard exam (Shukura, ESOL student)

Emerging Worlds Paper 4: Literacy

Conclusion Participatory pedagogy has occasionally been criticised for seeming to limit students to discussing only what is within their immediate experience. We would argue, however, that in the classes we are describing here, whilst lessons were always based on students’ ideas and knowledge, students were also regularly exposed to new ideas – either those of other students, ours or those found in media, government or popular discourse – and invited to analyse these and reflect on them critically. We suggest that the work we did in our class constantly built upon and deepened collective knowledge via problem posing, the development of discussion skills and our expectations that students would dig deeper and be stretched by the texts they ordinarily found challenging in the outside world. This series of lessons was interesting for other reasons, not least that they led to students taking a form of action which was collective, external and explicit. Of course, not all action in participatory teaching is of this nature – in many cases it is the result of invisible changes which might take place long after students have finished our courses. This experience, though, was for us an exciting example of what can happen when students work on issues which are genuinely of concern to them in their lives and how they can, as a collective, go some way to taking action to effect change. However, we would not wish to overstate the case for the ‘action’ aspect of Participatory ESOL teaching after this experience alone. Indeed, many of our discussions at our project meetings centred on the long-standing debate about the role of literacy in the lives of individuals and societies and of the claims made by some educators that literacy

learning in itself empowers and liberates people who face deeper structural inequalities in their lives. The notion of ‘empowerment’ particularly is a strong one in adult education but it is only too easy to bandy around this word until it becomes confused or empty of meaning. In recent times, adult basic education has been governed by a top-down narrow set of demands driven by the supposed need to equip adults with skills for work and economic success; ‘empowerment’ for adults has thus come to mean, for some, gaining competence in the ‘skills’ required by industry and business. On the other hand, we would argue that as educators we need to recognise ‘the validity of people’s own definitions, uses and aspirations for literacy’ (Crowther, Hamilton and Tett 2001:2) and to develop curricula which are learner-centred and locally responsive. Also, as we mention above, students need to acquire powerful literacies and discourses such as argumentation, academic literacy and so on - in this project we recognised this but we wished also to work bottom up with students’ real literacy needs in their day to day lives whilst at the same time fostering the development of transportable skills across domains and genres. We would argue that the lessons we describe in this chapter achieved these aims to a large extent. Our approach seems to us to have enabled students to make literacy their own, gain in confidence and, in some cases, to take action to attempt to effect change in their lives.

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Final summary points:  The texts students were able to access using our approach were of a much higher ‘level’ than those ordinarily found on an E3 scheme of work. Using the Participatory ESOL approach they were therefore able to access, analyse and critique texts normally unavailable to them. In many cases these were texts from newspapers and other sources which furnish public opinion and feed into powerful discourses.  The texts students themselves needed to write arose directly from their own participation in a campaign to defend their interests. We regard this as useful literacy which is transportable to other domains and which is more likely to be acquired by students because of their immediate need to use it in their daily lives.

 By working holistically with spoken and written discourse and visuals students were able to contribute complex ideas even when they felt unable to do so in writing. This provides essential links between the ‘word’ and the ‘world’ and again is more likely to be acquired because of its direct relevance to students’ lives.  By working collaboratively students were able to build a community in which everyone was able to contribute. At some points the hierarchy normally present between teachers and students was broken down, especially at moments when we were all engaged in the same objectives and needing to learn the same genres and text types.

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References Auerbach, E. R. (1992) Making Meaning Making Change: Participatory Curriculum Development for Adult ESL Literacy. Center for Applied Linguistics/ERIC Auerbach, E. and N. Wallerstein (2005) Problem-posing at work: English for action. Edmonton, Alberta: Grass Roots Press. Barton, D. (2006) Literacy: An introduction to the ecology of written language (second edition). Oxford: Blackwell. Bryers, D., Winstanley, B., and Cooke, M. (2013) Whose Integration? ESOL Nexus, British Council. Available at http://esol.britishcouncil.org/sites/esol/files/Whose%20Integration2.pdf Cope, B. and Kalantzis, M. (eds.) 1993 The Powers of Literacy: A Genre Approach to Teaching Writing London: The Falmer Press Crowther, J, Hamilton, M and Tett, L (eds.) (2001) Powerful Literacies. Leicester: NIACE Freire, P (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum Galbraith, R (2011) ‘Act now for ESOL!’. Post-16 Educator, issue 62 March-April pp.3-5 Hamilton, M, Barton, D and Ivanic, R (eds.) (1994) Worlds of Literacy. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Moon, P and Sunderland, H (2008) Reflect for ESOL Evaluation: final report. LLU+ at London South Bank University and Action Aid. Available to download at www.reflect-action.org