English Language Teaching

Write a one page description of the English Language Teaching you have seen at your placement school:

Improving literacy skills has been a school wide goal for at my placement this school year. They have just begun to use a program called Doorway Into Practical Literacy (DIPL). The DIPL program focuses on spelling, grammar, reading, and writing and is now used in all classrooms (prep through grade 6). In the beginning of the week students receive spelling words, which they practice visualizing and then writing. The major difference I have seen with this concept is the fact that they focus solely on the sounds of the words. For example, one of the students has a broken arm so I was writing down her words for her. She was orally spelling them to me, except she wasn't telling me the letters just the sounds. I kept telling her okay good you know the sound but what is the actual letter. I was later informed that my way of spelling is quite different from this program. I like the way they are focusing on letter sounds, however, as we all know there are letters that have similar sounds. One of the words was cuff and the young girl sounded out the word and I began to write c-u-f and she said that was right. I said are you sure this is right, she again sounded out the letters and said yes, still leaving out the last f.
Another technique in this program is the use of nonsense sentences. They have sentences that have difficult words in them but as a whole don't make a sense. The objective of this is to have students focus on sounding out the letter sounds and correctly spelling each word. They use words that don't make sense in a sentence to challenge students to focus on each word. I think this is a good technique and the students have shown growth in the 3 short weeks I have been here.
Each week the students learn a new grammar rule. They discuss vowel sounding, letter blends, prefixes and suffixes, etc. Overall, there technique in teaching literacy is extremely similar to ours. After discussing this with my teacher her, she explained that this is the first time they have followed such a regimented program. Most of the teachers do find it very hard to believe how structured we are in our teaching at home. The style is very much laid back here, which of course has it's pros and cons.