Second edition

Main aim	Subsidiary aims
Personal aims
To practise making polite requests in the context of making holiday arrangements. Example exponent: Could you give me some information about hotels?	Grammar: to revise modal auxiliary verbs. Functional exponents: Could/Wouidyou,..? Vocabulary: to consolidate lexis for travel, accommodation. Phonology: to focus on intonation. Speaking: to give controlled oral practice.	To improve my organisation of the whiteboard. To give clearer examples.

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Procedure	Stage arms
Show students pictures of various holiday destinations. Ask them to talk about their last holiday.	To contextualise the topic of holidays.
Tell two short stories about holidays (one true, one untrue). Invite students to ask questions and then to guess which story is true.	To give students a model for the speaking activity.
Allow time for students to plan their own story, which may be true or not.	To give students time to plan their speaking.
In groups students tell their stories. The rest of the group ask questions and guess if the story is true or not.	To give students fluency practice. To provide opportunities to practise the sequence of tenses in a spoken narrative.

By identifying a separate aim for each stage of the lesson we can be sure that there is a dear purpose for each activity that we plan, which contributes to the main aim of the whole lesson. Individual stage aims also help us to cheek that the activities in the lesson are relevant to our main aim and that they are arranged in the best possible sequence. Looking through a sequence of stage aims is a very good way to understand the learning progression of a lesson,
identifying and selecting main and subsidiary aims are the first steps in planning a lesson. Once we have decided on these aims, we can design or select the most appropriate stage aims and activities, put them in the best order and choose the most suitable teaching aids and materials. After the lesson, we can look back at this part of the plan to see whether we have achieved our aims, Le. whether we have succeeded in teaching what we planned to teach. This also helps us to select the most appropriate aims for future lessons.


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Unit 19 Identifying and selecting aims

in addition to learning aims, we may also want to think about our personal aims ’тёаoifiaii'''m’ims''sli:bw'Wliiat vve would like to improve or focus on in our teaching. Like those given in the first table above, these might be about improving the way we handle materials and teaching aids (things we can use to support our teaching in the classroom) or particular teaching techniques, or they might be about our relationship with the learners. Here are some more examples:
to make more use of the phonemic chart (a poster with phonemic symbols) to get learners to work with different partners to get quieter learners to answer questions.
■ Key concepts and the language teaching classroom