Creating and implplementing a didactic sequuence as an educational strategy for foreign languuage teaching

Abstract

This text focuses on a didactic sequence (DS) which was put into practice during the school year 2011-2012 with 6th grade students from the public school Jaume I "El Conqueridor" of Catarroja (Valencia) in the area of Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL). The DS was applied to the teaching of an expository text, and different pedagogic strategies-vocabulary redundancy, familiarity with the ideas involved, and a checklist to encourage student autonomy-were implemented to allow students to experiment this practice as a coherent, cohesive process adapted to their needs. The final DS design stroke a balance between a grammatical and a purely ideational focus and, as a result, students were able to improve their acquaintance with, and use of, the main features of expository writing without becoming estranged in the learning process.