Lesson Planning: Task Design and Sequencing Arrangement of Lesson Segments in a Beginning Class

Lesson Planning: Task Design and Sequencing

Arrangement of Lesson Segments in a Beginning Class

Guidelines for Instructional Sequencing & Task Design

• Introducing One Thing at a Time
• Move from Nonlinguistic to Linguistic Output
• Move from Words to Sentences to Connected Discourse
• Break Down an Activity into Manageable Subtasks
• Allow for Ample Preparation and Planning Time
• Allow for Student Collaboration to Work on Tasks

Case Scenario (p. 215)

• Comment on the teacher’s choice of learning tasks and sequencing of activities. What would you have done differently?
• Mr. Garfield starts a beginning class of English by introducing family and kinship terms. He uses a chart of a family tree to introduce and explain all the kinship terms. In his next activity, he spends about 10 minutes asking his students various questions about their families. Next, he gives his students the following assignment: Choose a partner and interview one another in English about your families. He gives them 15 minutes to complete the interviews. However, as Mr. Garfield begins to circulate in the class, he notices that students are confused. They have no idea how to form the questions in English, they are speaking their first language, they are searching through vocabulary lists in their books, and they look frustrated.

Plan a Mini-Lesson

• The topic of your mini-lesson is the alphabet, and the communicative skill that you want your students to develop is spelling their own names. Develop an outline of a sequence of activities in which you introduce either parts of the alphabet or the whole alphabet. When planning your lesson, consider the following questions: In what communicative contexts do we need to know the alphabet? How do we use it? What particular language skills are involved?

References

• Brandl, D. (221). Communicative language teaching in action: Putting principles to work. Cognella.