The StudyDo design supports teachers in helping students develop English proficiency. The free book, Bridges, works to bridge the gap between understanding English and producing it.
Focus on Language
Even when school exams focus on proficiency, not content, some textbooks continue to question students on facts from the text. This causes teachers and students to focus on content.
Too much focus on content distracts students and teachers from noticing and using language.
Content in the StudyDo books is always chosen to hold the learners’ interest so that the language can be noticed and produced. The teacher is never responsible for testing content, so she never needs to translate it for students.
This also means students never need to memorize facts or stories. They only need to develop their proficiency in using English, and the StudyDo design helps them do that.
What does the teacher do?
The StudyDo books are designed to require no extra preparation and to be easy for teachers to use.
The teacher’s role is to encourage thinking and language production in students.
To do this, the teacher provides opportunities for students to discuss content in order to process language meaningfully.
Since there’s no need to translate content, the teacher can allow students time to study the language of the text to find out what happens next. This keeps students curious throughout a lesson and eager to move on to the next one!
How does StudyDo work so well?
The StudyDo books are based on well-researched principles of second language acquisition.
Research shows that learning language requires two things: 1) input that the learner can understand and 2) opportunities to use that input to make meaning.
Each StudyDo activity provides interesting target language that the learner can understand and a chance to use the target language to express the learner’s own ideas. Students quickly increase both their understanding and their use of English. Read more about the StudyDo design and how to use it in our section for teachers.
