Sample Lesson Plan

Sample Lesson Plan

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an explanation of this lesson plan

Why I chose this content and approach

When I first started teaching high school ESOL, I wasn't quite sure what sort of proficiency, knowledge, or skills I would have to cultivate. But, after teaching them for short time, I was able to see areas that needed building.

Perhaps the biggest of those areas was literacy. While most of the students could use social language to "chit-chat" very fluently, their writing lagged very far behind. Many of them could not even write as accurately as they spoke. Furthermore, some didn't know how to use punctuation and capitalization.

At the very center of this problem was a lack of awareness of written language. Conceptually they didn't know what sentences were and they didn't know any grammar terminology. Due to this lack of awareness, students could not consciously monitor their own production and any explicit or metalinguistic feedback on errors such as fragments or run-ons would be pointless.

I realized that I had two choices. One was to teach them form inductively without using any terminology. The other choice was to give a few lessons focusing on terminology and metalinguistic concepts.

I made the second choice and began to teach a series of lessons about language. I did this because, I wanted to have a common language with which we could discuss language. I also felt that metalinguistic awareness could benefit my students by making available certain metacognitive strategies for self-monitoring of production. Besides that, the Maryland High School Assessments require that students know the grammatical terminology for labeling the parts of speech and the parts of a sentence.

The following lesson plan relates to the language domain of the TESOL/NCATE Standards for the Accreditation of Initial Programs in P-12 ESL Teacher Education. This lesson plan demonstrates my own knowledge of language while standing as an example of how I help my students learn strategies for "monitoring their own syntactic structures in spoken and written form."

lesson plan ~ analyzing language ~ sentences

students:

ninth grade ESOL students in a sheltered class of about 16 students

high intermediate proficiency with variable literacy levels

high fluency - low accuracy

objective:

By the end of the lesson, students will be able to tell what a sentence is and identify its parts

--- subjects, verbs, objects, and complements ---

purpose:

The students need to be able to identify and discuss the various parts of a sentence in order to participate in later explicit grammar instruction.

The students need to understand the concept of a “complete” sentence in order to avoid fragments.

It is hoped that lessons about language will make some self-monitoring strategies available to the students.

drill: (warm up, recall)(5 minutes)

Students in small groups review the parts of speech that they learned in previous lessons by working in groups with the teams study method to complete the exercise. “language similarities”

introduction ~ language

introduce the lesson and theme

have students state and paraphrase the objectives

What is a sentence?

Why do we need to know this?

developmental activity (full class)

What is a sentence? (teacher-student dictation)

A sentence is a group of words that express a complete idea.

A standard sentence always has a subject and a verb.

Guided activity (Think Pair Share)

Help students evaluate sentences (on OHP) on the basis of the criteria

Use the activity to teach “correctness” and introduce subjects, and complements

Independent practice (team study activity) – uses handouts

Lock step -

students in pairs quiz each other on finding the parts of the sentence

Have one student label subjects, verbs, and complements while the other checks the answers and gives guiding feedback to help the partner find it on his/her own.

Have students switch places frequently.

Assess

Give the students a short quiz in which they must circle the subjects and verbs and then judge whether the sentence is complete or not.

closure

In a full class interaction, help students to ask each other questions from the lesson that summarize what they learned.

ex) What is a sentence? How do I know if it is complete?

note:

These standards were copywritten by Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Inc. (TESOL) in 2002.

Although admittedly this lesson does not teach form communicatively, it does use form as content to be communicated. In this lesson, the students learn how to talk about form while learning to identify certain forms and certain errors.

The class activities in this lesson focus on skill-building exercises but cooperative learning structures such as think-pair-share and teams quiz create many communicative speaking opportunities (High, 1993). Furthermore, the sentences used in the exercises are all taken from a passage the students have previously read about similarities between different languages. Thus, there is some content for discussion.

In retrospect, I feel that it was class time very well spent and I believe the students appreciated these lessons. I saw results and benefits.

High, J., 1993, Second language learning through cooperative learning, San Clemente, CA: Kagan publishing)