Parts and stages of a lesson

PARTS AND STAGES OF A LESSON
Teaching language successfully to ESOL students is a complex process requiring careful planning. The main purpose of your lesson is to teach 'something' to your learners in such a way that by the end of the lesson they will have demonstrated a skill or knowledge they did not have at the beginning of the lesson. It is important to use a range of methods, materials and activities to ensure the learning outcomes are fully achieved

To help organise our time and the process of teaching, we need to think about including separate stages of the lesson.

Introduction/Warm up/Revision
Presentation
Practice and Production
Plenary or whole class review
1) INTRODUCTION/WARM UP/REVISION
To understand language use, language must be introduced in context, or in real-life situations. At the start of a lesson, it is useful to 'set the scene' by encouraging the class to think about a particular topic, or function; or by brainstorming ideas onto the whiteboard, or by revising material from a previous lesson which will be useful for the lesson now. Some techniques we have looked at include:

Open questions, pre-reading and pre-listening questions, the use of picture stimulus, spidergrams, including input from the students to find out what they know, the use of key words on the board and so on. This gets students thinking along the right lines, focussing their attention ready for new material to be presented, controlled by the teacher to set them on the right track.

Remember, you do not always have to start a lesson cold. A good teacher (like teacher 1 above) has got the students ready even BEFORE they come to a lesson on a new topic by giving them a pre-study homework task. The benefits of this are many, but the advantage is most clearly seen when there is a big gap between lessons - for example if students come only once a week. Tasks and preparation mean they keep thinking about English from one week to the next.

2) PRESENTATION

At some point in the lesson you need to make sure that you clearly present language that you want the students to focus on. This will be new language that they need to have explained to them with your help and guidance. Though we teach ‘communicatively’ that does not mean that we leave the students in confusion.

New material can be presented straight away with clear explanations and examples showing what the language means and how it is used. The target language is presented via a controlled model, such as a short written text, a dialogue or a grammatical structure, so that students can see or hear the new language as well as understanding its meaning and use. This provides a model for learners to copy and then use to produce their own language.

If you use a ‘real’ text to introduce language then the presentation is slightly different. This is the idea of ‘focussing’. If you do this you present a text to your students for comprehension and discussion and then ask them to focus on certain aspects of the language - ‘relationship between the past tense and the past perfect’ or ‘how to express comparison’. It is slightly different as the language presentation may come further on in the lesson, but it is still there and should still be a teacher-led section of the lesson.

You can use group and pair work ‘discovery’ techniques - where you give students the information and they work out the rules. After they have tried you can ‘clarify’ the rules for them and this will be your presentation stage.

Harmer has good examples of the different ways this stage can be managed.
3) PRACTICE AND PRODUCTION
Practice consolidates the knowledge learners have hopefully gained from the presentation stage of the lesson, providing them with the opportunity to use the language meaningfully and successfully. The teacher's role here is to manage a range of activities which allow learners to try out the new language through pairwork and groupwork. This can take the form of guided dialogues, role plays, information gap activities and problem solving. The practice can be for oral, reading or writing skills, with texts and other stimuli introduced which include the target language which can then be practised in a range of activity types - true/false comprehension questions, completion exercises, summarising, noting pros and cons for discussion and written work etc. Short written pieces using a certain style can be done and monitored carefully by the teacher - students can begin to experiment in oral practice trying out the language they have focussed on. Teachers should use a range of practice activities. This will help prevent lessons becoming predictable and it also builds in the element of repetition but in an interesting way. The teacher initiates, manages and encourages at this stage, intervening whenever necessary and checking for errors. These can be focussed on later in the lesson.
As the lesson moves away from teacher guidance to semi-free or free language production by the student, we think of it in terms of language production. This production activity may take the form of a group solution to a problem [oral] or a written task, or the use of a particular grammatical item [ie story in past tense or descriptions of a person using adjectives/adverbs]. The final output by the student should meet the aims of the lesson with the teacher monitoring for errors but much more an observer than anything else at this stage. Here, the students should be producing the target language with minimal, if any, teacher interference.

Always remember that you will not instantly have perfect production of language by your students. A new item, especially an important one such as ‘past tense forms’ or ‘personal pronouns’ needs a bit of thinking about and several weeks of ‘revisiting’ by the students before they are secure. What’s more they will progess at different rates. Perfect production does not magically occur in every student at the same time! Your job is to make sure that they have a chance to experiment and learn through making mistakes. If you only ever do controlled practice, students do not have the chance to use what they know alongside what they are learning to use.

Practice and production should be seen as leading from one to the other. It is no use springing a production task on students that you have not prepared them for through practice. For example, talking about what kind of movies you like does not lead immediately to students writing reviews of films. That is a different skill. ‘Directing someone around your school’ in controlled practice does not lead straight to ‘writing directions to your house’ as the vocabulary is completely different. You cannot give students a biography of a famous dead person to study and then expect them to write their own biography as the tenses are different for people still living.

This is a common mistake among novice teachers and one you should watch out for as you begin teaching.

4) PLENARY OR WHOLE CLASS REVIEW
It is extemely important that you end your class cleanly and with a refocussing on what the class have been doing.

Some teachers do this very formally by talking with the class about ‘what we have been learning today’ or referring back to lesson aims written on the white board. The students can see how the lesson has progressed and how the activities are all linked.

Some teachers have a short question and answer session in which the students give their opinion on what they think they have learnt.

In other lessons the whole class review may be longer. For example, if your students have been writing letters in pairs or doing a discussion task in groups then you may wish them to present what they have done to the class.

You also need this stage in the lesson to give your students a homework task while they are clearly focussed on you!

SELF-CHECK 4:2 4

How does the role of the teacher change through an ESOL lesson as described above?
Match the parts of the lesson described to the four stages below.
"I asked the class about the weather today, and we wrote some vocabulary on the board. Next, I gave out worksheets with pictures of the weather and days of the week, and as I played a listening of this week's weather forecast, students listened and matched the picture to the correct day. This was followed by pairwork, with an information gap activity in which students completed a weather map of Britain. The final activity was a written description of the weather in each season in their own country. Some of them read out what they had written to the class. For homework I gave them a research task on the climate in a range of different cities around the world so that we can prepare a class display next lesson."


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