Pre-plan.
Walking into a class of new students can be a daunting experience even for experienced instructors due to lack of proper pre-plans and plans to give them class direction. Lesson plans are beneficial for both learners and instructors in the following ways:
- It gives teachers time to plan the individual components
- It gives a logical progression of teaching activities
- It shows the learners the time that has gone into lesson preparation
- It enables the teacher determine whether there is a balance between skills and activities in the lesson plan
The use of a lesson plan is to give the teacher a framework for teaching. Tried and tested plans can be repeated within several classes and adapted accordingly. The lesson adopted lesson plan needs to incorporate a number of components because learners tend to get bored from repetitive practices. Proper plans help order these components properly. Pre-plans and plans help order activities in a logical manner and in the accomplishment of the lesson aim.
Explanation of activity chosen and its justification
Language Analysis Form. Video learning ensures students’ learning activities are more enthusiastic. From the lesson plan, the teacher should ensure that students engage in interesting concepts. Additionally, they should involve their peers in interactive learning that involves asking them interesting questions that facilitate learning. In this lesson plan, students will be tested on how to differentiate quantifiers from objectives. The goal of this lesson is to ensure that students are able to provide suitable examples and ensure they are able to correct errors in sentences.
Lesson plan
Stage 1: Engagement plan. When the teacher arrives in class, learners may not be ready for instruction. Here, the teacher should ensure that students are warmed up and engaged accordingly to ensure they are ready for class. This stage engages the learners to prepare them mentally for what will be taught. Engagement activities take less than 10 minutes and give learners a buffer time between the beginning of class time and the official start of the lesson. It ensures that the teacher does not have to repeat themselves for students who get to class late. There are many engagement activities that can be used to engage students that fit into the lesson theme.
Stage 2: Presentation. At this stage, the instructor introduces the learning theme to the class, which leads them to the lesson activities. This stage may be combined with the engagement activity. This stage is critical in learning languages although it tends to be missed out. When teachers fail to engage learners in what follows, they tend to lose interest and experience a mental shutdown. The rationale behind this step is to ensure that learners are adequately prepared for what is next. It primes the brain to be ready to learn more. The presentation should be predominantly lively, oral, and short for instance, taking ten minutes or less. Picking thematic activities can help ready the students for the lesson. For example, students may be asked to guess what they are going to learn about and only answer in the affirmative or negative. When they guess correctly, illustrations can be used to allow students to engage in interactive learning even as they give their general feedback and comments.
Stage 3: Study. This is the main aspect of the lesson which entails writing, speaking, reading and listening activities in isolation or as a combination. The adopted activities should be tied to the engagement activity and used to analyze the learning activities. The importance of this stage is to ensure that learners grasp the task under analysis. This is achievable through a series of activities that focus on grammar or broad-based practices that improve language competencies. The chosen study activity can be used to test the knowledge of tenses in various ways. For example, students could be instructed to indicate examples of past tense and past continuous tenses on the blackboard and how they are used. Alternatively if the learning concept is on language development, the learning material could be used differently in pre-planning the teaching of new language to learners. Alternatively, learners could be asked to read learning material and answer related questions in a controlled environment. Students could then be asked to discuss in groups answers on broader conceptual questions dealing with the underlying questions. As demonstrated by the above examples of controlled activities, the tasks allow a limited response from the students to ensure that the target languages are taught accurately. Before teaching fluency, teachers should focus on accuracy.
Stage 4: Practice. In this instruction phase, students are given the freedom to use what they have learnt in previous phases in different phases. This phase entails more open tasks that allow for a more natural usage of the target language. This stage is known as free practice. In this stage, learners are allowed to utilize the language learnt independent of learning aids even as they explore the concepts learnt further.
This learning phase acknowledges that students are more likely to internalize the learnt concepts if they allowed to practice in class. Depending on what the teacher wishes to practice, there exists various freer tasks including games, communication activities, and class discussions. If the teacher has introduced a new language, this would be the ideal time to test if learners can recycle learning material and apply it in a productive manner.
The above lesson stages tend to be effective if the instructor utilizes a structured teaching instruction plan. In addition, it is an ideal teaching model suited for lower ability students but could be less effective for fast learners. In cases where the instructor is dealing with a relatively imaginative higher level learning group, the teacher might lead in the practice phase with the narrative idea and ask the class to construct a question on the blackboard. Accordingly, the teacher should analyze the vocabulary and sentence structure by prompting the students using the blackboard.
Stage 5: Warm down.This is the final phase of the lesson plan which teachers tend to overlook due to time constraints. It is during this stage that the teacher and learners tend to take a break and recap the lessons learned. If the lesson was mostly work-focused, this would be a good time to take on something lighter.
A description of the shape that the lesson would most closely take
This study utilizes Harmer’s Engage study activate lesson (ESA) plan in How to Teach English.
Engage. This entails the activities in a teaching sequence where instructors attempt to arouse learners’ interests by stimulating their emotions. They seek to engage them through such activities as musical activities, games, challenging discussions, anecdotes, and dramatic narrations.
Study.Here, the teaching sequence entails asking learners to focus on in-language construction and information, ranging from macro to micro concentrations. The macro aspects entail studying the spoken style transcript while the micro aspect entails studying a particular verb tense. It incorporates a number of study styles, exploration through evidence, pairs, individuals or groups. This aspect focuses on language construction.
Activate. This aspect denotes the point in a teaching sequence where learners are encouraged to use language freely and as communicatively as possible. Unlike the study aspect, the focus in this stage is not on the practice or construction of specific bits of language but the use of all language appropriate learning in any given situation. The activities involved in this stage include role plays, debate, discussions, poem reading, and writing.
According to Harmer, if students do not engage to activate from the safety of a classroom setting, they may experience problems transferring the acquisition of language in the real world (2). At lower levels of straightforward learning of language, the straight line ESA is considered appropriate but it may be insufficient for advanced learners.
Lesson justification rationale.The rationale for the use of a short video was to ensure that learners understand and internalize the information learnt in class. Students tend to be enthusiastic about learning through video clips that they can review during their free time. This learning method is also likely to arouse their interest in the learning material positively by allowing them generate appropriate responses. This is the main reason for my choiceof learning videos.The students could then be asked to accompany their answers with effective video simulation. This approach further ensures that learners are more involved in the process through interactive learning.
In the second phase of learning progression, the plan entailed engaging students in spoken activities to give them more practice while improving their independence through a variety of problem-based learning tools. By using real world concepts, my lesson plan ensured that learning concepts are interconnected with the real world.Harmer noted that video learning significantlyimproves classroom learning by ensuring that they follow all the lesson activities (223). Another justification for video learning was that it allowed for immediate feedback from the class.
When learner participation is maximized, learning is eased. As Harmer suggested, video learning content allows facilitates authentic and varied language learning responses and further facilitates the learning process (223). Additionally, they are enjoyable and motivational while offering a visual perspective that is flexible to use. As an instructor, I strived to engage my students in a variety of challenging activities that facilitate learning.
In sum, a lesson plan offers the teacher a framework for conducting the lesson. Additionally, making a lesson plan is beneficial for both the teacher and learners in that it allows teachers to plan individual components and shows the time that goes into lesson preparation. Additionally, it shows a progression of lesson activities and indicates whether there is a balance learning skills and teaching aids in the lesson. Video learning was chosen for its potential to engage learners in an interactive way that helps them internalize things learnt in an interesting way. In the creation of the ideal lesson plan, ESA was chosen for its incorporation of interactive activities in a teaching sequence where instructors attempt to arouse learners’ interests by stimulating their emotions. As Harmer postulated, if students do not engage to activate from the safety of a classroom setting, they may experience problems transferring the acquisition of language in the real world.
Work Cited
Harmer, Jeremy. How to learn English. New York: Longman Publishers, 2007.