Lesson Plans

Date of the lesson: 13/04/16

Duration: 40min 

Subject: English Language

Class: 1^st Gymnasium

Class size: 14 students

Age: 13 years old

Learners’ level: B1+ Level

Topic: Treatments & Natural remedies

Language Focus: Vocabulary → Useful words related to treatments and natural remedies

Assumed Knowledge: Ability to comprehend a new text’s topic and discuss about it

Materials:

1. Laptop + Projector
2. A handout with an exercise
3. Whiteboard (to identify key terms)
4. Coursebooks

Lesson Aims:

• To learn new vocabulary
• To practice reading skills
• To build on students’ general knowledge

Lesson Objectives:

► Students (Ss) will be able to:

• Skim through a text to obtain its overall impression
• Deduce the meaning of unfamiliar lexical items through the context
• Know the meaning and use of a specific category of phrasal verbs (about illnesses & treatments) and use them in context.
• Talk about treatments and natural remedies

Anticipated problems: 

• • Difficulty in understanding the meaning of the phrasal verbs that have to do with illnesses and treatments. Solution: T provides Ss with an example in order to see the phrasal verbs in context. However, this is not done for the phrasals which seem to be easy.
  • Unknown words in the text. Solution: Ss are encouraged to deduce the meaning from the context. After doing the post-reading exercise, T provides synonyms of these words.

Lesson planning is considered to be a very important skill that every teacher should have. It is possible to teach without a lesson plan but pre-planning increases the numbers of the teacher’s options and the chances of a successful lesson. Planning is essentially a thinking skill. Planning is imagining the lesson before it happens. It involves prediction, anticipation, sequencing, organizing and simplifying (Scrivener, 2005) 

The lesson plan was designed for the first year of gymnasium (B1+ level) that consists of 14 students, 10 boys and 4 girls. I was really excited about teaching this classroom as I had taught all of the activities in this class, too. The students are all of the same level and age. There are two hyperactive pupils that sit in the front seats. All the students love dealing with ICT materials when learning.

The lesson focuses on natural remedies and treatments. In the Warm-up stage, I welcome my students and explain the lesson objectives. In the Pre-reading stage, my students are introduced to vocabulary that has to do with the text to follow. It is about natural remedies of animals and how they treat themselves when sick or in pain. The exercises, which are from the course book, ask students to match the words in bold with their synonyms. With higher level students, teaching synonymous words can assist with the problem of repetitious writing, for instance teaching ‘questions’, ‘issues’, ‘matters’, and ‘concerns’ through the reformulation procedure, is a way of building range and variety in vocabulary use (Hedge, 2000).

In the While-reading stage, the students are asked to read the text aloud. Reading to oneself is, like listening, a ‘receptive’ skill and similar teaching procedures can be used to help learners (Scrivener, 2005). I will also show photographs to my students on the board with laptop and the projector. Teachers have always used pictures or graphics-whether drawn from books, newspapers and magazines, or photographs-to facilitate learning. Pictures can be in the forms of flashcards, photographs, illustrations, images from an overhead protector or projected computer images (Harmer, 2001). The purpose for showing the photographs for my students is to help them visualize the plants that animals use as medicine. They are really strange as they do not grow in Europe and they can intrigue my learners to ask more questions about them.

The Post-reading stage, includes scanning the text in order to find specific information and eventually, answer the True/ False questions. In this stage, my students have the possibility to read the text again, better understand its meaning and ask questions about specific information that may find hard comprehending.

In the Vocabulary practice stage, the focus is on phrasal verbs that have to do with illnesses and treatments. Firstly, my students will be asked to explain the meaning of the phrasal verbs if they know them and then, they have to match the phrasal verbs to the gaps of each sentence.  This way, they can learn to speak about an illness or a remedy in a lot of ways and use these phrasal verbs in many contexts.

The Backup activity includes speaking about animals and zoos. I thought that I could create an interesting discussion based on these two lines of the text: “In fact, it has been claimed that putting animals in zoos takes them out of an environment where they have access to natural remedies, with the result that many become sick and die”. I am really curious about their opinion on this matter and I would like to check whether they can spot important advantages of keeping animals in zoos, instead of speaking merely about the disadvantages.  Of course, I will guide my students to speak about both advantages and disadvantages and will provide my own opinion only if students have said enough about the matter.

In the closing stage I thank my students for having a great lesson together and I assign them   homework for the next day. The homework includes reading the text again and answering some multiple choice questions about it. The purpose is to do extensive reading, which will allow them both to speak about this specific topic and develop general reading skills.

All in all, the lesson appeals to my teenage students as it concerns nature, animals and weird plants apart from treatments. It can raise my students’ global awareness as well as their motivation for learning English.

REFERENCES

Hedge, T. (2000). “Teaching and learning in the language classroom”. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Scrivener, J. (2005). 2^nd ed. “Learning Teaching”. Macmillan ELT.

Harmer, J. (2001). “The Practice of English Language Teaching”. Longman Handbooks for Language Teachers.

Date of the lesson: 20/04/16

Duration: 40min

Subject: English Language

Class: 1^st Gymnasium

Class size: 14 students

Age: 13 years old

Learners’ level: B1+ Level

Topic: Animals & Zoos

Language Focus: Vocabulary → Useful words related to animals and nature.

Assumed Knowledge:

• Ability to understand and infer basic information from an audio.
• Ability to deduce the general idea of a text and talk about it.
• Ability to express their view on a specific topic (zoos).

Materials:

       1. Laptop + Projector

2. Copies of the unit prepared by the student teacher.
3. Whiteboard (to identify key terms)

Lesson Aims:

• To practice listening skills
• To practice reading skills
• To learn new vocabulary

• To build on students’ general knowledge 

Lesson Objectives:

► Students (Ss) will be able to:

• Practice their listening/reading skills
• Use new vocabulary about animals in other contexts
• Talk about zoos and how they treat animals

Anticipated problems:

• • Difficulty in understanding the meaning of some verbs in the listening stage. Solution: T asks Ss to do the first exercise (pre-listening) to make sure that all Ss know the exact meaning of the verbs and will correspond well to the listening task.
  • Unknown words in the text. Solution: Ss are encouraged to deduce the meaning from the context. If T considers that a particular word is too difficult, then he provides an example on the whiteboard. 

The lesson that I prepared for the first Gymnasium of Moraitis School focuses on providing knowledge and helping my students acquire their own opinion on keeping animals in zoos. This is done through listening and reading activities and with the integration of ICT. I used the Learn English Teen section of the British Council website to do gap-filling, multiple choice and matching activities on the board with the help of the projector. One of the real advantages of the Internet is that now, teachers and students have access to ‘authentic’ English wherever they happen to be working. Some teachers plan whole lessons around the Internet (Harmer, 2001). The lesson is connected to the previous lesson that I taught last week, as we referred to this topic at the end of the lesson. The class consists of 14 students, 10 boys and 4 girls that are of B1+ level.

The lesson begins with the Warm-up stage, which is a pre-listening vocabulary activity. Students are asked to match the verbs with their definitions. The purpose behind this exercise is to make the students aware of some verbs that describe the actions of animals. It will help them to correspond to the listening task that will follow. The exercise is completed on the British Council’s website so that I can attract their attention and make them willing to participate.

In the While-listening stage, my students have to answer T/F questions on their handout while they listen to a guide talking about Llamas in a zoo. I used speakers on the laptop in order for the audio to be loud enough and my students can listen to the guide talking clearly. I advise my students not to try to understand the meaning of every word the speaker utters, but to pay attention to what the speaker wants to mean. As Hedge (2001) suggests, many language learners fail to realize that when they listen to their first language they do not actually hear every word. They also fail to appreciate that we integrate linguistic knowledge with our existing experience and knowledge of such things as topic and culture, and do not need to hear every word. This means that learners often unrealistic expectations and try to understand each word of a listening text.

The Post-listening stage, includes listening to the audio again if the students found it really difficult to understand. Then, they are supposed to answer a multiple choice exercise about the listening on the British Council’s website again. This way, I can be sure that my students pay attention as they prefer the Internet to a simple handout with exercises.

The While-reading stage is the most important stage of the lesson. My students read the text on their own and after that, I engage them into pair work. They have to answer True/False questions about the text and decide on the correct answer only by speaking in English. This way, I develop their ability to think, to express their opinion and fluency. I encourage them to do the exercise carefully, as I will keep a score for each group based on their correct answers so that we can have two winners.

What is more, in the Post-reading stage, I ask my students to look at the word “outweigh” in the text. I ask them to state if they know any other verbs that begin with the prefix out-. Then, they are asked to complete the exercise by putting the “out- verbs” in the correct gaps of the sentences. They have to infer the meaning of the words from the context. This way they both practice new vocabulary but, also, how to be thoughtful learners.

The backup activity is about visiting a website and discovering facts about animals. My student will have the possibility to learn weird, funny and sad facts about animals that live in zoos or in the wild and have a discussion on them. If we do not have enough time to do this task, I will provide the link of the website to my students and encourage them to visit it at home at talk about it in the next lesson.

Finally, I assigned to exercises as homework that I created using the Corpus of American Soap Operas. Text and contexts used with learners should reproduce authentic target behavior and the unmediated use of corpora of naturally occurring text provides an excellent means of meeting this requirement (Sinclair, 1991).

Closing the lesson in an interesting way is an essential stage and should not be omitted. In this stage, I can summarize what we discussed in the lesson so that it can end in a focused way. Feedback is of equal importance, too, as I may ask them what they found useful or how the liked the lesson and why. Of course, in this stage students are encouraged to answer questions about things they did not understand during the lesson.

Generally, this a lesson that depends a lot on ICT and this is the best part of it, in my honest opinion. Students are not often exposed to technological means during their English classes, so I believe they will be eager to participate in all of the tasks. They have already been exposed to a small discussion about the lesson’s topic (Animals & Zoos) so I believe that they will be more confident to complete most of the tasks.

REFERENCES

Hedge, T. (2000). “Teaching and learning in the language classroom”. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Harmer, J. (2001). “The Practice of English Language Teaching”. Longman Handbooks for Language Teachers.

Sinclair, J. (1991). “Corpus, Concordance, Collocation”. Oxford University Press.