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<h1>Lesson Planning</h1>
<h2>9.1 INTRODUCTION TO THE PPP FORMAT: HOW TO WRITE A SIMPLE GRAMMAR LESSON PLAN</h2>
<h4>The teacher presents the target grammar structure. Learners are then given the opportunity to practice the structure in a controlled manner. Finally, learners produce new grammar in a freer and more meaningful way that also incorporates other elements of language. In a typical one hour lesson, each of these three stages would last for about 20 minutes.</h4>
<h2>Presentation</h2>
<h4>In this first stage, you need a meaningful context in which to show how this grammar is used. You can do this in many different ways; you can draw pictures on the board with speech bubbles explaining what is happening; you can use a short video clip or photographs; you can even mime a short scene if you feel confident in your acting ability!</h4>
<h4>Here’s an example of how you might present the second conditional.</h4>
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<h4>On the board draw a stick man with thought bubbles coming out of his head. In these bubbles stick pictures of money, a sports car, a yacht and a big house.</h4>
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<h4>Introduce the grammar structure with an example sentence: ‘If I won the lottery, I would buy a big house and a sports car.’</h4>
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<h4>Ask questions that focus on the form of the grammar: ‘What verb form comes after ‘if’?’</h4>
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<h4>Also ask questions that focus on the meaning of the grammar: ‘Do I have a lot of moneynow?’</h4>
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<h4>Drill the class with the examples until you’re satisfied that they can do it reasonably well.PracticeThere are many ways that you can get learners to practice in a controlled manner; these include gap fill exercises, substitution drills, sentence transformations, reordering sentences, or matching a picture to a sentence, for instance.</h4>
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<h4>‘If I ____ (to win) the lottery, I ____ (to buy) a big house and a sports car.’</h4>
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<h4>‘a big house / If I won /, I would buy / and a sports car / the lottery.’</h4>
<h4>At this stage, it’s quite important that the activity is controlled so that the focus is almost entirely on the new grammar structure.A good way to do this is to put learners in groups or pairs to work on the activity while you monitor and give feedback. After this, do a similar activity on the board so that all of the class is involved. You could make this into a game or a speaking activity, i.e. make it more communicative but still very controlled.</h4>
<h2>Production</h2>
<h4>In the final stage of the lesson, you should give learners the chance to use the new grammar in a meaningful yet freer way. Good activities for facilitating this include role-plays, picture cues, ‘find someone who...’, information gaps and interviews. If using an interview activity, you might get learners to ask three people what they would do if they won the lottery, for instance.</h4>
<h4>It’s important at this stage to monitor and note down any errors that occur, so you can build this into your class feedback and error analysis, which is a great way to round off such grammar lessons.</h4>
<h4>When we teach grammar, we give our learners the ability to express themselves accurately, while also fulfilling their expectations of what it means to learn another language. This basic plan will help you deliver such lessons effectively.</h4>
<h2>9.2 PLANNING TO TEACH LISTENING AND READING SKILLS</h2>
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<h4>Our life is largely taken up with receiving information from outside sources, most of which enter our consciousness via our eyes and our ears. ESL lessons focusing on reading or listening require a variety of teaching strategies and activities, so there are many ways to design a lesson plan for these receptive skills. Despite the many ways in which reading and listening activities can take place, there are nevertheless general stages we can follow when planning.</h4>
<h2>Step 1- Establish your objectives for the class</h2>
<h4>What are your learners going to gain through their exposure to this reading or listening? Think about this carefully and give your class-specific goals that they will, hopefully, have met by the end of the class.</h4>
<h4>Here is a good example:</h4>
<h4>• “Learners will read and understand the vocabulary and phrases related to asking for items of food in a grocery store.”</h4>
<h4>If your objective is too vague, it will be difficult to place any value on it or discern whether it has been met during the class. Here is a poor example:</h4>
<h4>• “Learners will have better-listening skills.”
This objective is too large to achieve in one clas and impossible to measure.</h4>
<h2>Step 2- Pre-reading / Listening Task</h2>
<h4>At this point, you should aim to discuss the topic with the whole class or in groups. Your purpose here is to discover how much your learners know about the topic and the extent to which they are ‘primed’ for the teaching material. Ask questions that are related to the learners’ personal experience. At this first stage, you should also aim to generate interest in the topic of the lesson by showing images, headlines or keywords.</h4>
<h2>Step 3- Teaching the essential vocabulary</h2>
<h4>There will be words that your learners are unfamiliar with that are essential to understanding the teaching material. For instance, aim to teach any vocabulary items that are necessary for answering comprehension questions, or unusual words that appear a number of times. Remember: this is not a vocabulary lesson, so you should be looking to develop passive knowledge, rather than getting learners to the point that they can use these words correctly in writing or speaking.</h4>
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<h2>Step 4- Reading/listening for general understanding</h2>
<h4>Prepare a small number of questions that evaluate your learners’ general comprehension of the teaching material or extract relevant information (three or four questions is an appropriate number) If a listening lesson, play the recording once; if a reading lesson, have learners read the text. They answer the questions while engaging with the teaching material. Plan for some not being able to answer the questions: allow time in your lesson plan for replaying the relevant part of the recording, or rereading the relevant part of the text.</h4>
<h2>Step 5- Reading/listening for specific information</h2>
<h4>After general understanding, create a task that aims to check a more detailed understanding of the teaching material. As with the previous stage of the lesson, allow for repeated engagement if necessary. Before getting feedback, plan time for learners to compare their answers in pairs or groups. If certain questions are causing problems for many learners, allow additional time in the lesson to focus on particular reading passages of specific parts of the listening.</h4>
<h2>Step 6- Post-reading / listening</h2>
<h4>A natural part of everyday reading or listening is for there to have been a point to the whole thing: we read or listen to obtain information and then do something with that information. Your receptive skills lesson plan should finish with a productive activity related to the topic. This task may be spoken or written. A class discussion is a good activity, as is a role-play, or writing a letter.</h4>
<h4>Always remember that receptive skills lessons are important, as they reflect the way we generally obtain new information in real life. They should, therefore, replicate the kind of actions we undertake in our everyday reading and listening, but this should be balanced with the necessity to repeatedly expose learners to the teaching material to make sure comprehension is achieved.</h4>
<h2>9.3 PLANNING TO TEACH VOCABULARY</h2>
<h4>Although it does not get as much attention as grammar, vocabulary is as fundamentally important in developing English language proficiency. The benefits of a wide-ranging vocabulary are many, as learners can’t express themselves effectively with grammar alone. Nevertheless, teaching vocabulary can be challenging and creating an effective vocabulary lesson plan is key to successfully equipping learners with new words.</h4>
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<h2>Step 1- Choose appropriate words to teach</h2>
<h4>Selecting suitable vocabulary to teach is not always as easy as it seems. The easiest way to do this is to choose a list of words that are part of the learning material or have been chosen as being important in the course syllabus. Doing so will guarantee that both you and your learners will understand the purpose behind learning the new words. A good number of new words for any given vocabulary lesson is between seven and ten</h4>
<h2>Step 2- Decide what learners need to know about the words</h2>
<h4>There are many aspects to knowing a word. Here is a list of questions you can ask yourself when deciding what your learners need to know about any particular word:</h4>
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<h4>What does the word mean?</h4>
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<h4>What type of word is it (a verb / a noun / an adjective etc.) and what are the other parts of speech?</h4>
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<h4>How is it spelled/pronounced?</h4>
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<h4>Does it follow any (un)predictable grammatical patterns (irregular verb / uncountable noun)?</h4>
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<h4>Does the word have particular connotations (positive/negative)?</h4>
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<h4>When is the word used or not used (formality/rudeness)?</h4>
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<h4>How is the word related to other words (synonyms/antonyms)?</h4>
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<h4>What are its collocations (the way that it occurs together with other words)?</h4>
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<h4>What do its prefixes and suffixes tell us about the meaning?</h4>
<h2>Step 3- Model the proper use of vocabulary</h2>
<h4>You’ll often find that learners will translate a word into their native language and think that they are well on the way to knowing it. They tend not to take into account the questions noted above. For this reason, it’s essential that you provide contexts that exemplify how the word is used. Most often this would be in the form of a sentence, although you can use a variety of other methods to illustrate correct use. Models of use can also include a visual illustration, a mime of an action, or a sliding scale of words with varying degrees of strength, for instance.</h4>
<h2>Step 4- Get them using the words</h2>
<h4>Start learners off using the words in a similar context to the one in which you presented, such as writing sentences that use similar situations to the ones you used in your examples. Substitution drills are a good way of slowly getting them to use the new words in slightly different contexts and building up knowledge of how the word is used.</h4>
<h2>Step 5- Test their knowledge</h2>
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<h4>Word games are a fun way of testing how well learners know a word. Hangman is a good way of checking they can spell a word correctly, while then Blockbusters grid format game is good for checking definitions (What ‘H’ word means the opposite of ‘sad’?). It’s also a good idea to revisit vocabulary from previous lessons on a regular basis. A useful strategy is to have a vocabulary bag in which you keep all the words the class has learned in a bag on slips of paper. Testing learners on these words will help them retain their knowledge of how to use them.</h4>
<h4>Initially, it might seem strange to devote a whole lesson to learning vocabulary, but the rewards for doing so are great in terms of language development!</h4>
<h2>9.4 HOW TO PREPARE A WRITING LESSON PLAN</h2>
<h4>Writing, unlike speaking, is not an ability we acquire naturally, even in our first language: it has to be taught. Writing is often referred to as the ‘Cinderella’ skill because it’s the one that gets left behind while all the others ‘join the ball’. What this means for us as language teachers are that unless our learners are explicitly taught how to write in their new language, their writing skills are likely to get left behind while their speaking, reading and listening develops. Fortunately, there are ways we can plan effective writing lessons.</h4>
<h2>Step 1- Generating ideas</h2>
<h4>This is a natural first stage in planning a writing lesson and is vital because learners can’t write unless they have ideas to write about. This planning stage will be most effective if you give learners the opportunity to work together and brainstorm lots of ideas. Plan to control this stage by allowing enough time in your planning for learners to generate more ideas than they need. Additionally, have some sample ideas or sub-area categories ready in case the class needs help in finding inspiration.</h4>
<h2>Step 2- Focusing ideas</h2>
<h4>A natural progression from idea generation is the ideal organization. Learners may work in groups to put the ideas they generated in the previous stage into a ‘mind map’. This mind map can then be drawn on the board, using ideas from the different groups. Alternatively, you could get learners to put ideas into a table with a series of headings for different boxes. At this stage, you may want to add useful vocabulary and/or phrases that the learners will use in their writing but couldn’t produce.</h4>
<h2>Step 3- Examine a model text</h2>
<h4>Once the learners have come up with their own ideas and thought about which are the most relevant or important, the next part of your lesson plan should be to give them what they need to express those ideas in the most appropriate way; an effective method is to provide them with a model of ‘good practice’. Looking at a model text raises learners’ awareness of the conventions</h4>
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<h4>of typical text styles of different genres. This text should have a similar style, length and organization to that which you want the learners to produce.</h4>
<h4>Step 4- Organizing ideas</h4>
<h4>After learners have seen how ideas are organized in an example piece of writing, they can organize their own ideas in a similar way. A good way of planning this stage is to put learners in groups to draft a plan of their work. This group plan might include the number of paragraphs and the main points of each paragraph.</h4>
<h2>Step 5- Writing</h2>
<h4>In some situations, you might wish to make stages one to four your whole lesson, with the actual writing done outside of class. The advantages of doing this are that the learners can spend time thinking about their composition and not feel rushed. However, getting your learners to write in class enables you to monitor and suggest ideas, provide extra language input and spot those learners who are off task. Think about how long the first four stages of the plan might take and decide if you want to include the actual writing of the text in your lesson.</h4>
<h2>Step 6- Post-writing lesson follow-up</h2>
<h4>Although it might feel like the culmination of a writing lesson, the writing itself should not be the final stage of your writing lesson plan. It’s important to follow up with some review and revision of what has been written. Two things you should plan for in subsequent writing lessons are peer review and error correction. Getting other class members to comment and give feedback on a piece of writing can be both motivating and a non-threatening correction technique for learners. Nevertheless, follow this up with a teacher-led review. You can plan for this by either collecting in the writing and giving individual feedback, or by monitoring, making notes of common errors and going through these as an end-of-lesson review on the board.</h4>
<h4>Writing remains an under-appreciated skill in language classrooms, so planning effective lessons around the written form of the language will be greatly appreciated by your learners.</h4>
<h4>So, how does it all @it together? The following lesson plans were written by OnTESOL graduates. These lesson plans show how you can teach English effectively and have fun all at the same time!</h4>
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<h1> Teaching Speaking Skills</h1>
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