English Language Teaching in its Social Context

202 ANNE BURNSteacher to structure a unit of work. During the theoretical input sessions at the beginningof the project, Jennifer Hammond had proposed a teaching-learning cycle (Callaghan andRothery 1988), an adaptation of which (Hammond 1990) is presented in Figure 1 2.1 below,which could be used to inform the planning of classroom activities.read examples of genre;discuss and analyse textteacher and learnersconstruct text; ongoingstandard ,,‘DEVELOPINGJ’conferencing between ‘,,I’ teacher and learner ‘\,own textiINDEPENDENT CONSTRUCTION OF TEXTFigure 1 2.1 The teaching learning cycleSource: Hammond (1990)This cycle incorporates different classroom activities which move the learners throughvarious spoken and written tasks related to the genre being taught. The teacher can beginthe cycle at any point, but for genres being taught for the first time it is preferable for theteacher to work through all stages. For this particular class, the teacher decided to work inthe following sequence of stages:1 Modelling2 Joint Negotiation ofText3 Independent Construction.Modelling involved discussion of the cultural and social purpose of the genre and thesharing of experience within that context, followed by examples of a model text. At thispoint the teacher and learners discussed the staging of the text and the distinctive languagefeatures which realised the text.The stage Joint Negotiation involved the teacher and learnersin a joint construction of a text in the same genre, followed by the joint construction ofanother text by the learners working in groups. The final stage, Independent Construction,comprised the teacher and learners working together to discuss and rcvise the group’s jointlyconstructed texts and the learners’ construction of their own independent texts.