Language Experience Approach (page 2)

While most references to the language experience approach (LEA) (Allen, 1976; Coate & Castle, 1989; Hall, 1978) include in their definitions use with young students, it can also be used successfully with older students in grades 3 through 8 who are struggling with learning to read, as well as with second language learners (Barr & Johnson, 1997). Struggling readers, regardless of age, have many life experiences that teachers can tap into to create text. It is important to recognize that some second language learners or students of poverty may have experiences that differ from your experiences or that they may offer different perspectives on the same experience. For example, a fifth-grade teacher who took a group of inner city students to another part of town to visit an art museum was amazed that most of the after-the-field-trip discussion centered on the bus ride across town and the sights seen from the bus window rather than the art in the museum. The students had seen many paintings when the museum sent a traveling show to their school the previous year. The bus ride was the new experience that the teacher could capitalize on for a language experience story.

If a broad definition of LEA is employed, then the multitude of classroom experiences provided through a student-centered, “hands-on” curriculum is fertile ground for language experience “stories,” as well as the clarification of new concepts. Science and mathematics, in particular, provide students with new vocabulary and concepts that can be integrated into the LEA (Heller, 1988).

LEA can be used with individual students as well as with small groups. From a social constructivist perspective (Newman & Holzman, 1993), LEA can be very successful when students work together with a “more knowledgeable other.” This person may be the teacher, a more experienced student, teacher aide, or parent.

The Power of the Language Experience Approach for Struggling Readers

The language experience approach as it relates to word recognition makes available an instructional framework for teaching struggling readers. LEA provides:

• A way to reinforce the one-to-one correspondence between spoken and written language
• A meaningful context based on students’ knowledge and experience
• The use of repeated readings of the same text as well as repetition of high-frequency words
• A meaning context to examine components of language (words, phonemes, and morphemes)
• The modeling of sentence structure by the teacher