TEFL Online Training Unit 3: Planning

Context

Used to begin focusing on predictable concepts and language.

Communicative Practice

Using the language to do something, a game, information gap, problem solving, etc, which focuses on the message rather than the language.

Vocabulary Expansion

Vocabulary terms added by the Teacher or the Students to enhance the learning experience.

Freestyle Conversation aka. "Free Talk"

1.) Don't rely on just a few students. Remember who the eager beavers have been recently, and ignore them politely. Try to enlarge the circle as much as possible. 2.) Allow awkward and somewhat long periods of silence. 3.) Limit the time of freestyle discussion to 5-10 minutes of class time, and don't use it all the time for office hours either. This means that your freestyle discussion can serve as a warmer, and as a way to introduce a new topic or re-envision on an old one.

Formal Lesson Planning

A plan for a specific lesson is chiefly for yourself and no one else. Your plan would benefit the students insofar as you have prepared enough appropriate and stimulating materials and insofar as the timing of the various segments of your lesson is effective. Many teachers can do this without even writing notes for themselves, and this is a talent not to be disregarded. Other teachers go through the tedium of detailed planning only to find that very little is realized in the classroom. Given these two extremes, there is still one thing that is always true about lesson plans: they are transferable. If you planned a lesson with enough detail for yourself to reference the activities and make simple notes about how things went, then much later you can return to that plan and make a few revisions, knowing what specifically went wrong and what things to do differently.

Warmer

An activity that a teacher uses at the beginning of a lesson to give the class more energy, see energy levels, introduce material and basic routines, and provide students with a more relaxing and comfortable learning environment.

Communal Activity Materials

An example of this would be a class scrapbook, which in its initial form is just an oversized notebook with an attractive cover. It gets introduced to the class with some customization, boldly and attractively written text that says "Grade 3, Class 2". Students are welcome to bring two-dimensional objects Photographs Newspaper and magazine clippings Small notes to share with the class A pen, to write a new short entry Photocopies of awards students have received in their other courses and extracurricular activities Birthday calendars Holiday journals or objects such as pressed flowers or four-leaf clovers Photocopies or excerpts from excellent compositions students have done Chinese vocabulary words for the teacher to learn, explained in English The scrapbook can circulate the room during class time if it is not disruptive, giving more introverted students a stimulating alternative to some of the other activities. Also, announcements can be made about new additions to the scrapbook or whenever a certain type of new material is welcome.

Core Materials

Can include dialogue reading, listening or other materials on which to build a lesson.

Course Planning

For course planning, there is the dominant principle, less is more, more is less. This means that the more detail you add to your plan, the less flexibility you will have during the weeks of your course to adjust your lessons to suit your students. This means that it's good to have a less detailed plan, one which is open to minor changes. A lot of the time, teachers can be criticized for not following the course plan while they would be immune to criticism for having a course plan that is not so vague as to dictate each and every activity.

Simple Activities for Class

Guess the Word Word Bingo 20 Questions Two Truths and a Lie Fake-out MASH

Controlled Practice

Opportunities to use the target language with lots of supportive cues from the teacher, drills, sentences on the board, pictures, etc...

Spontaneity vs. Preparedness

Planning means two things: preparation and timing. A common mistake pre-service instructors make is relying solely on their students to keep up the momentum of class discussions. This is not good. We should remember that as teachers we are ultimately responsible for directing the pace and flow of the lesson. If we come to class unprepared, we run the risk of making the unpleasant discovery that last week's wonderful class of eager beavers will have, in this week's lesson, mysteriously transformed into an unresponsive behemoth.

Textbooks and Printed Handouts

Printed handouts are great. Each handout takes the form of a double-sided A4 piece of paper, with headings and content and graphics, which can be printed and photocopied for each of your students or for groups to use. Generate and collect enough of these handouts, and you will have an excellent portfolio, always ready for demos for new teaching jobs or save-the-day lessons for those times when you lacked time to prepare anything new. Printed handouts are new to your students, more so than "open your books to page 37", and can show that you care.

Five Things to Rely on When Planning

Simple Activities, lists, Textbooks and Printed Handouts, Communal Activity Materials, and Realia.

"Unresponsive Behemoth"

This means that when the teacher introduces the topic for the week and asks an open-ended discussion question, the class is quiet. Occurs when a teacher attempts class without necessary preparation and depends on the students to lead class momentum.

Lists

When you have spare moments throughout the day, at a coffee house or in the teachers' lounge, take some time to create and add to your lists, which would contain Idioms. Proverbs and sayings. Clothing items or other concrete vocabulary under topic headings. Situations that can be quickly introduced and used in role-play activities. Tongue twisters. Minimal pairs and pronunciation drill items. Sentence examples under topic headings. Mind maps in the form of web diagrams or Venn diagrams partially completed with vocabulary. Once you have some lists compiled, it becomes a lot easier for you to plan lessons or just to use the lists spontaneously during class time.

Realia

Your teaching bag functions as a bag of tricks. Realia includes any physical object which can be referred to by its English name and can be interacted with according to the function it has. Students appreciate it when you bring unique items from your home country and introduce them to the class. Five minutes of odd class time can be well spent if you have prepared such an item.

Show and tell

along with many of the Communal Activities such as a class scrapbook, this could be done as a warmer in which you could ask students to describe the place where they'd find an object, pictured or brought to class and used as realia.

A vocabulary list

as with a list of idioms or common phrases, this serves as vocabulary expansion. Seldom in a written plan would you need to devote an entire section of your written lesson plan to deal with a vocabulary list. It would just be referenced in other parts of your plan. Between the controlled practice and the context sections in the plan about clothing items above, there could be a section about the vocabulary list that would need to be used, with vocabulary that needs to be taught, such as "blazer", "golf shirt", "button-up shirt", and "slacks", along with vocabulary that might be avoided such as "sport coat" and "dress pants".

Every lesson requires...

controlled practice and communicative practice. That way, you'll make sure to prepare your students for the communicative activity that will take up most of the class time, so that students have made a good start with stem sentences and vocabulary when you drilled them on it. Moreover, having something about these two parts of your lesson will help you to develop the lesson over time and improve it.

A song

if the song is relevant to the topic, it works as context, because it contains words likely to be used by the students in activities and because the lyrics may tell a story about a person's experience related to the topic.

A video

if the video clip relates to the class's topic at all, it should help to establish several reference points for the students and make them imagine the same situation. So it would serve to establish the context of your lesson, a realm where the words and sentences would be used.

Half of a dialogue

if you selected an incomplete dialogue, printed on a handout or written on the chalkboard, it wouldn't work as controlled practice as much as a complete dialogue. Even though you might run through the dialogue in chorus, for brief practice and to make sure everybody reads it, that half of a dialogue would mainly establish a situation and a problem for students to solve later through communication. It would leave pair of students in the middle of a situation and a problem, with the task of communicating. Your lesson plan would have instructions about how to get students through this first and only printed half of the dialogue, in effect, how to use that half-dialogue as one of your core materials.

Menus for restaurant role-play

these would also be core materials, referenced in other parts of your plan or described in one section of your plan if a lot of instructions need to be given about how to use the menus

A drill

this happens whenever you are giving students example sentences to repeat after you in chorus. They are practising, and being controlled by you as you can correct them immediately and have them repeat additional examples of the same type of sentence. So it would be controlled practice.

Information gap

this is when any one student lacks complete information and they have to communicate with each other to get it (then are rewarded in an activity for announcing the information correctly). So, it would be communicative practice.

A game

this would probably enliven students and get them using the vocabulary more rapidly and more simultaneously as they compete. Integrated into a lesson, a game would work as a warmer, or as communicative practice if it were more elaborate.

A map

though the map would be used in class during a controlled practice and again in communicative practice, you may have designed an activity that is rather complicated for students. In the core materials section of your plan, you could have instructions for the teacher about how to use the map, for instance, in a competitive direction-giving activity between teams, how to award points and so on—while the other sections of your plan could be kept clear enough that you could use the content there to walk your students through controlled practice and direct them step-by-step how to get started without having to lecture them about how to do the activity.

Scavenger hunt

when students start with a list of things to find (someone who has travelled more than 2000km from their home town, someone who hasn't washed their face yet today) students are going to need to put into communicative practice several of the sentence patterns you'd have taught them earlier in the lesson, along with some of their own.

A dialogue

when this is printed on a handout or in a textbook and then read by the class in chorus, this is controlled practice, because they have the sentences and lots of supportive cues from the instructor who can monitor all students immediately. Likewise, as students practice the dialog in pairs, this would still have the function of controlled practice. The printed dialog is also one of the core materials you would use, but would only be noted as such if your plan needs to contain a lot of instructions about how to use it.

A situation dialogue

without text to read verbatim, if students are given a situation to deal with (ie one of you two has just received a bad haircut), then students are going to need to come up with their own things to say, helped in part by what you've practiced with them earlier. This would focus students on the message rather than the language, so it serves the purpose of communicative practice.

Half of a video

would be a great attention-getter, and would leave students wondering why it was stopped in the middle. This could function as a warmer if you also elicit speculation from the students about where the people are, why they behaved as the video showed so far, and what they might do next. Even a brief situation dialogue, if your students are familiar with those already, could function as a warmer when introduced through half a video, because students would quickly develop awareness of certain aspects of the topic.