General recomendations for English teachers of the 21st century
методическая разработка по английскому языку на тему

English lesson plan for modern Gen-Y

Main aim

• To develop students’ ability to talk about past habits using used to in the context of childhood and addictions.

• Students will, during the less restricted practice stage, use the target language with sufficient accuracy for their partner to understand their past habits.

Subsidiary aims

• To develop students’ ability to listen for the main ideas in a text.
• To improve students’ ability to talk about the topic of addictions by introducing an addiction lexical set.

Personal aims

• Give students more time to discuss in pairs after a listening activity before feedback.

Materials

• Realia – chocolate, cigarettes, coffee, a PC
• Pictures or short video clips of children playing on swings, dressing up for Halloween, studying at school.
• Listening CD and photocopies
• Photocopies of handout for each student.

Anticipated problems and solutions

• Problem: Students may be unable to think of three things they did as a child but don’t do now on the spur of the moment.
  Solution: Provide prompts and examples if necessary.
• Problem: Students will not be familiar with “to give up”, to quit”, “to cut down on” in the listening text.
  Solution: Elicit these items in the context of addictions.
• Problem: Students will be unfamiliar with the pronunciation of “used to”
  Solutuon: Drill in affirmative, negative and question forms

This lesson follows a typical PPP (Presentation, Practice, Production) model. With this model we first present or elicit the language in some way. The students then practise it in more or less controlled situations and finally produce it in a more authentic situation. Have a look below for more about these practice and production stages.

Lead in

A lead in activity is designed to “warm the students up” – to generate interest and get them thinking about the topic. When you introduce a topic, for example with pictures, a video or some questions, you activate in your students minds a mental image or expectation based on their existing knowledge of the topic. This mental image is often called a schema, and so we can say that the aim of a lead-in stage is to “activate your students’ schemata”. Your students’ existing knowledge and experience can then be used to personalise the lesson.
Target language

The aim of the presentation stage is to present or elicit the target language – the language that we want the students to be able to use correctly in order to achieve the aim of our lesson. There are different ways to do this – in this case the teacher elicits the meaning of the target language with a series of concept questions before giving the target sentence itself.

Manipulating form

By this we mean that the teacher presents (or elicits) the question and negative forms of the target language, as well as, perhaps, other examples in the first, second or third person.

Restricted/controlled practice

The first practice stage, where the teacher drills the pronunciation of the target language, is very restricted, in the sense that students focus entirely on the sentence containing the target language. There is no opportunity at this stage to incorporate other language. The practice stage of PPP lessons tends to start with restricted practice in this way, and then gradually move on to less restricted and eventually much more authentic practice.In the less restricted practice stage of this lesson, students are given the chance to circulate and ask each other questions (using the material that was gathered during the lead in). The focus is still very much on the target language, but much less restricted or controlled than the previous exercise.

Authentic/Free/Fluency practice

Finally, the students are given the opportunity to produce the target language in a much freer context. The activity in this lesson encourages them to talk about the past, and they may naturally use the target language during their conversations, but they are also free to use other language. There shouldn’t be any pressure on the students at this stage to use the target language, and you may find that they don’t use it very much at all. This is why we can call this stage authentic practice – in an authentic situation we wouldn’t use “used to” in every sentence when communicating with someone – we would maybe use it once or twice in addition to other forms.