Lesson Plan № 2

Class: Upper Intermediate Listening Week 3

Aims: to practice listening to an authentic news broadcast and get key information from it

Resources: tape recorder; tape; worksheet

Activities: 1) Ask students to work in groups and list five important events in the news in the last week.

2) Groups share information.

3) Play the tape. Students decide if any of the events they mentioned are talked about on tape.

4) Distribute the worksheet, which lists three topics and a set of questions. Students listen for answers to the questions.

5) Students compare their answers in groups.

6) Play the tape again. Discuss problems students had with any words or expressions on tape.

In lesson plan № 1, the reading lesson, the teacher divides the lesson into six activities which focus on prediction, reading for global comprehension, giving and getting feedback, and summarising. In lesson plan № 2, the listening lesson, the teacher similarly divides the lesson into six activities which focus on gathering background information, listening for key words, listening for specific information, giving and getting feedback, and diagnosing listening difficulties. Despite the many kinds of activities which teachers use in language teaching, a limited number of activity types tend to recur no matter what kind of approach or methodology the teacher is using. These activity types can be classified according to the following categories.

Presentation activities. These are tasks in which new learning material is presented for the first time. A presentation activity serves to introduce and clarify a new learning item. This could be a lexical item, a grammatical item, a function, a discourse feature, or a learning strategy. For example, a teacher may present patterns with ‘ if clauses ’ using a chart or table as the first activity in a grammar lesson. Not all lessons include presentation activity. Thus, in the listening lesson plan there is no direct presentation of the strategies. A different lesson plan for the same lesson might have included the teacher first talking about listening strategies and which strategies to use when listening to a news broadcast.

Practice activities. These are defined as tasks that involve performance or learning of an item that has been previously presented. Practice activities in language teaching often involve a degree of control over student performance or involve the use of a model. For example, in a conversation lesson, dialogues may be used to practice sentence patterns, grammar, or functions, and drills may be used to practice pronunciation and to develop sentence fluency. In the reading lesson plan, most of the lesson is devoted to activities that practice reading skills.

Memorisation activities. These tasks involve memorisation of information or learning material. Memorisation activities may be used as a strategy to help consolidate new learning items or as preparation for a subsequent activity. For instance, students may be asked to memorise a list of vocabulary that they will later use in a speaking task. While traditional approaches to language teaching (e.g., Grammar Translation and the Audiolingual Method) made extensive use of memorisation activities, contemporary approaches tend to discourage memorisation in favour of activities, which promote more creative uses of language.

Comprehension activities. These tasks require students to develop or demonstrate their understanding of written or spoken texts. Comprehension activities may address different levels of comprehension, including literal comprehension (understanding meanings stated explicitly in a text), inferential comprehension (drawing conclusions and making predictions based on information in the text), and evaluation (making judgements about the content of a text based on personal and other values). For example, students may read a passage and make inferences about the author’s attitude toward the topic or listen to a lecture and write a summary of it. Several activities in the reading and listening classes above focus on comprehension skills.

. These are defined as tasks which require learners to use in a creative way knowledge or skills that have been previously presented and practised. Application activities may require students to integrate knowledge and skills acquired from different sources, to apply learned items to a new context or situation, or to personalise learning items through relating them to their own ideas, needs, feelings and experiences. E.g., after having practised a dialogue in which certain sentence patterns or functions were used, students may now perform a role play in which they have to use the patterns and functions creatively in a situation involving transfer and negotiation of meaning. An application activity in a writing class might represent the final stage in a sequence of activities in which students first read an essay where certain rhetorical forms are used (presentation), do a set of exercises to practice using different rhetorical and discourse devices in paragraphs (practice), and then complete a written assignment incorporating the rhetorical and discourse devices using ideas and information of their own.

Strategy activities. These tasks develop particular learning strategies and approaches to learning. Thus, in order to improve learners’ use of systematic guessing when encountering new vocabulary in a reading text, learners may be given exercises which train them to focus on suffixes, prefixes, and word order as useful linguistic clues for guessing the meaning of new words in a text. In listening, learners may be trained to use clues in the situation to help understand meanings. This could involve, for example, making predictions based on the setting, on the roles of the people involved in the interaction, and on the people’s intentions and purposes. In the reading lesson (lesson plan № 1), the first activity, which involved making predictions based on the headline of a newspaper article, was designed to develop the strategy of using predictions to guide one’s reading.

Affective activities. These include tasks which have no specific language learning goal but are intended to improve the motivational climate of the classroom and to develop the students’ interest, confidence and positive attitudes toward learning. For example, in an English class, students may keep a journal in which they write about their feelings, fears and satisfactions in relation to the experiences they have in the class. They may share these both with their classmates and the teacher, and attempt to resolve concerns as they arise.

Feedback activities. These tasks are used to give feedback on learning or on some aspect of performance on the activity. E.g., in a writing lesson, after completing a first draft of their assignment, students may work in pairs to read each other’s assignments and provide suggestions for improvement. This feedback may address content, organisation or clarity of expression, and serves to provide information that may be useful to the student when revising the piece of writing. In the listening lesson (lesson plan № 2), the teacher used a feedback activity when playing the tape at the end of the lesson and discussed problems students had with any words or expressions on the tape.

Assessment activities. These tasks enable the teacher or learner to evaluate the extent to which the goals of an activity or lesson have been successfully accomplished. These activities may be used to diagnose areas that need further teaching or to evaluate student performance. Tests of different kinds are common examples of assessment activities. However, most classroom activities can also be used for assessment if they are used to determine how much students have learned rather than as a presentation, practice, or an application activity.

This classification is intended to help focus on the relationship between activity types and the purposes for which they are used in language teaching. It cannot be regarded as definitive, since some activities can be used for several different purposes, and distinctions between activity types can overlap. However, such a list can be useful in trying to clarify what it is that teachers do when they teach and why they select the kind of classroom activities that they so commonly use.

Ideally, the activities selected by the teacher are appropriate to the purposes for which they are intended, but sometimes there is a mismatch between activities and purposes, as in the following examples taken from a supervisor’s comments on two student teachers’ lessons:

In your reading class, your reported goals were to develop fluency in reading and to develop good reading habits, including reading for main ideas and keeping the purpose of the passage in mind while reading. This should involve a top-down approach to reading, i.e., one in which the reader is encouraged to use background information, prediction, and context while reading, rather than to use a word-by-word reading strategy. However, you use reading aloud as a regular classroom activity. There is a conflict here between teaching goals and the activity used to support these goals, since reading aloud requires students to focus on the form of a text rather than its meaning and to give every word in the text equal importance.

You report that your goals in your writing class are to develop fluency in writing and to develop the students’ ability to use drafting and revision skills when writing. However, the classroom activities you most commonly use involve copying and making minor changes to model paragraphs and compositions and sentence-based exercises which give students little opportunity for drafting and revision.

Another example of teacher preparation for the lesson may result as decisions in making the following plan for the Communicative Language Teaching (A. Doff, 1989).