Elevating ESL Literacy with the Learning Experience Approach

The Learning Experience Approach (LEA) stands as a powerful, holistic methodology in ESL education, particularly beneficial for adult learners. Rooted in the principle of leveraging personal narratives and spoken language to foster literacy, LEA transcends traditional teaching methods by making learning deeply personal and immediately relevant. This approach is adaptable across diverse educational settings, from one-on-one tutorials to dynamic classroom environments, accommodating both homogenous and heterogeneous learner groups.

At its core, LEA begins with the learner’s own experiences. Educators guide students to articulate these experiences orally, which are then meticulously transcribed. These transcriptions become the cornerstone for a range of literacy-building activities, encompassing reading, writing, and language analysis.

Initially conceived for children learning their native languages (Ashton-Warner, 1963; Spache & Spache, 1964; Stauffer, 1965), the efficacy of LEA has been consistently demonstrated across all age groups. Adult ESL learners, regardless of their prior educational backgrounds or literacy levels, arrive in the classroom with a rich tapestry of life experiences. LEA effectively taps into this invaluable resource, recognizing that each learner’s personal history is a fertile ground for language and literacy development. By focusing on the ‘whole learner’ and integrating ‘whole language’ skills, LEA fosters a deeply engaging and effective learning environment.

Key Characteristics of the Learning Experience Approach

While the practical application of LEA is as varied as the educators who employ it, certain fundamental characteristics remain constant, defining its unique educational philosophy (Hall, 1970):

Learner-Generated Materials: The heart of LEA is content created by the learners themselves. This ensures inherent relevance and engagement, as the learning material directly reflects their lives and interests.
Integrated Language Skills: LEA naturally weaves together all four core communication skills – reading, writing, listening, and speaking. This integrated approach mirrors real-world language use and fosters a more comprehensive understanding of language.
Learner-Determined Language Complexity: Vocabulary and grammar naturally emerge from the learners’ own language use. This eliminates the artificial barriers of pre-determined syllabi and ensures that language learning is always at a comprehensible and appropriate level.
Personalized, Communicative, and Creative Learning: LEA fosters a learning environment that is deeply personalized to each student. It prioritizes communication and encourages creative expression, making the learning process both enjoyable and profoundly effective.

Why LEA Resonates with ESL Learners

The effectiveness of reading materials for ESL learners hinges on two critical criteria, as highlighted by Krashen and Terrell (1983): comprehensibility and interest. LEA-generated texts inherently satisfy both. Firstly, the language complexity is intrinsically comprehensible as it stems directly from the learner’s own linguistic capabilities. Secondly, the content is guaranteed to be interesting and relevant, as it is rooted in their personal experiences and interests.

These criteria are particularly crucial in adult beginner ESL classes, where finding suitable reading materials often presents a significant challenge. Many simplified English texts designed for language learners are often perceived as either too childish or simply uninteresting for adult learners, failing to capture their attention or respect their maturity. LEA elegantly circumvents this issue by providing reading material that is both accessible and engaging, tailored specifically to the adult learner’s world.

Exploring Variations of LEA in Practice

LEA is not a monolithic method but rather a flexible framework that can be adapted in various ways to suit different learning contexts and learner needs. Two primary variations illustrate its versatility:

The Power of Personal Experience Narratives

The most fundamental and original form of LEA is built around the transcription of individual learner’s personal experiences. In this approach, the educator (or a more proficient peer in mixed-ability classrooms) works closely with an individual learner, ensuring the writing process is visible to the learner. The session typically begins with a conversation, sparked by a visual prompt like a picture, a topic of interest to the learner, a related reading text, or a recent event in the learner’s life. Once a topic is identified, the learner narrates a personal experience connected to it. The transcriber plays an active role by asking clarifying questions to help the learner expand on their narrative and refine their focus.

A defining feature of most LEA implementations is transcribing the learner’s account verbatim, without immediate corrections to grammar or vocabulary. This deliberate choice keeps the focus on content and communication, fostering fluency and confidence. It also provides a tangible record of the learner’s linguistic progress over time (Heald-Taylor, 1989). Grammatical accuracy and vocabulary refinement are addressed in subsequent stages, such as revising and editing. Building a strong rapport between the transcriber and learner is essential for successful LEA implementation, ensuring a supportive environment where the learner feels valued and heard.

Collaborative Learning Through Group Experiences

LEA also flourishes in group settings, where learners collaboratively construct language experience stories. These stories can emerge from shared experiences planned and executed by the group, or they can be inspired by various stimuli drawn from the learners’ lives – personal, professional, or academic. The process typically involves several key steps:

Selecting the Experience or Stimulus: This initial step involves collaborative decision-making with the learners to choose a prompt or activity that is conducive to discussion and writing. This could range from visual aids like pictures, movies, or videos to auditory prompts like songs, or tangible materials like books, articles, class projects, field trips, or even seasonal celebrations. Sometimes, activities are specifically designed to initiate this process.
Organizing the Activity: Once a stimulus is chosen, the class collaboratively develops a plan of action. This includes outlining the steps involved, the timeline, and the resources required. Writing these plans on the board serves as an immediate and practical link between the planned activity and the written word, reinforcing the connection between action and text.
Conducting the Experience: The experience itself can take place within the classroom or extend into the community, offering diverse learning opportunities.

Classroom-Based Activities	Community-Based Activities
Preparing food (sandwiches, French toast, salads, popcorn)	Field trips (to banks, markets, malls, libraries, city hall)
Making cards (thank you notes, get well cards, holiday cards)	Mapping the school or neighborhood
Class projects (simulations, bulletin boards, skits)

When the experience unfolds in the classroom, the teacher can provide a running narration, emphasizing key vocabulary and sentence structures as the activity progresses.

For learners with more advanced language skills, discussions themselves, in addition to hands-on experiences, can serve as the foundation for group-generated texts. Relevant discussion topics might include work experiences, navigating adult education, adapting to life in a new country, or current events. Again, the teacher can support this process by noting key words and phrases on the board as they emerge in the discussion, visually capturing the spoken language.

Discussing the Experience: Engaging all learners in a comprehensive discussion is crucial. The teacher facilitates this by prompting recall and articulation of the experience, again writing key words and phrases on the board. For example, the class might collaboratively reconstruct the sequence of events of an activity. While some learners might be capable of providing detailed descriptions or generating extended narratives, others might initially only be able to answer direct questions. The teacher strategically uses wh- questions—Who? When? What? Where? Why? How?—to stimulate and focus the discussion, ensuring all learners comprehend the conversation, regardless of their level of verbal participation.
Developing a Written Account: The class then collaborates to create a written account of their shared experience or discussion. Before drafting the text, pre-writing activities such as brainstorming, mind mapping, listing, or sequencing ideas can be beneficial. Learners might dictate sentences or sequences of events while the teacher transcribes, or students might work in smaller groups to draft sections of the account. Crucially, the writing process should be visible to all learners, whether on a whiteboard, flip chart, or projected.

During this stage, the teacher continues to prioritize fluency and content, refraining from correcting language errors immediately. Learners are encouraged to self-correct or assist each other. Formal error correction is reserved for later stages of revising and editing, maintaining focus on collaborative content creation.

For beginner learners, the written output might be simple, perhaps just a sentence or two, reflecting their current English proficiency. In LEA, the emphasis is on authentic expression and participation, not on achieving a specific length or complexity at the initial stages.

Reading the Account: Once the text is complete, it’s read aloud to the class, either by the teacher or a confident learner. The focus is on highlighting key vocabulary and sentence structures. Subsequently, learners engage in silent reading of the text. Oral reading can be integrated at various points during the text’s development, not just at the end, encouraging ongoing reflection and revision throughout the process.
Extending the Learning Experience: The LEA text becomes a springboard for a multitude of further language and literacy activities. These can be tailored to different proficiency levels, ensuring all learners can engage meaningfully with the material.

For beginner learners, extension activities might include:

Copying the story to reinforce letter-sound correspondence and handwriting skills.
Matching words from the text to corresponding pictures or definitions to build vocabulary.
Cloze exercises where learners fill in missing words (every nth word deleted), with or without word banks, depending on their literacy level, to enhance contextual understanding.
Selecting words for focused vocabulary, spelling, or phonics activities.
Using sentences from the text to illustrate and review specific grammar points, such as verb tenses, word order, or pronoun references.
Dictation exercises where learners write down the story as it’s read aloud, improving listening and writing skills.
Sentence sequencing activities where learners reorder scrambled sentences from the text, reinforcing sentence structure and narrative flow.
Word unscramble activities using key vocabulary from the text, enhancing spelling and word recognition.

More advanced learners can engage in more complex extension activities:

Using the group-produced text as a model for individual writing tasks, such as writing about a similar personal experience or offering a critical analysis of the shared experience. Learners can then share and critique each other’s work, fostering peer learning and feedback skills.
Collaboratively revising and editing the text for clarity, grammar, and style, preparing it for “publication” – perhaps displayed in the classroom or shared with another class.
Reading additional texts related to the topic to broaden their understanding and vocabulary.
Creating comprehension questions for their classmates to answer, developing critical thinking and text analysis skills.
Exploring different genres of writing by transforming the text into songs, poems, letters (e.g., a letter to the editor), or instructional guides.

In classrooms with mixed proficiency levels, teachers can effectively differentiate instruction by assigning foundational activities to lower-level learners while more proficient students tackle advanced tasks independently or in small groups, requiring less direct teacher guidance.

Conclusion: LEA as a Holistic Approach to ESL Literacy

While initially conceived as a method to enhance reading skills, the learning experience approach transcends this initial purpose. It serves as a highly effective technique for developing a comprehensive range of language skills – listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Its unique strength lies in its integrated nature, starting with students’ own experiences, whether individual or shared, as the bedrock for discussion, writing, and ultimately, reading. By witnessing their spoken words transformed into written text, students gain a deeper, more personal understanding of the interconnected processes of writing and reading, paving the way for confident and independent literacy development.

References

Ashton-Warner, S. (1963). Teacher. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Hall, M. A. (1970). Teaching reading as a language experience. Columbus, OH: Charles Merrill.

Heald-Taylor, G. (1989). Whole language strategies for ESL students. San Diego: Dormac.

Krashen, S. D., & Terrell, T.D. (1983). The natural approach. Hayward, CA: Alemany Press.

Spache, G., & Spache, E. (1964). Reading in the elementary school. New York: Allyn & Bacon.

Stauffer, R. G. (1965). A language experience approach. In J.A. Kerfoot (Ed.), First grade reading programs, perspectives in reading No. 5. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.