Teach english new edition r

ESA and planning
When we think of what to do in our lessons, we have to decide what it is we hope our 
students will achieve by the end of a lesson (or the end of a week or m onth, for example). 
We then try to plan how to get there (see Chapter 12). In this context, balancing up the 
three ESA elements reminds us of the need for student engagement; it prom pts us to ensure 
that there are study events built into the plan; it ensures that in almost all lessons there 
are also opportunities for students to have a go at using the language they are learning 
(or learnt yesterday, last week or last m onth). W hen they try to use language (whether for 
interacting with other people’s texts and conversation or in order to produce language 
themselves) they get a chance for the kind of mental processing that makes all that learning 
and acquisition worthwhile. We will remember, too, that is im portant to vary the sequence 
of events for the reasons we stated on page 29.
Many teachers have to plan around a coursebook (see Chapter 11) which has been 
chosen for their classes. But even where lessons are based on coursebook pages, it is 
im portant to m anipulate the activities in the book so that the three elements, engage, study 
and activate are evident in appropriate sequences.
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Chapter 4
Conclusions I 
In this chapter we have:
■ looked at how children acquire language with little effort provided they have 
exposure to it and opportunities to use it. But the language they are exposed to is 
rough-tuned by their parents, etc.
■ discussed the difference between the concepts of acquisition (a subconscious 
process) and learning (a conscious study of language). Despite some claims that 
learning is only useful for monitoring our own language output, we said that for