Teaching reading writing to A1 English students: is discourse analysis a possibility?

Teaching reading and writing to lower level students in a foreign language can be a challenge for teachers. How can one teach reading and writing if students have not developed the language to read and write yet? In this presentation we will describe how we use a combination of discourse analysis (Cots, 2006; Wallace,1992, 2003) and metacognitive strategies (Oxford, 1996) as a framework to guide our teaching of reading and writing in a lower level class. In our work with these learners, we focus on some aspects of the framework for textual analysis in critical reading (Wallace, 2003, p. 39) and adapt it to the level of the learners and to the learning goals of the syllabus. We consider it would be of the interest of foreign language teachers to revisit and explore practical applications of discourse analysis in the teaching of EFL reading and writing skills and acknowledge the importance of language and metacognitive awareness in the process as a key element to empower language learners