Simin Lidia Nicoleta - Useful techniques for effective lesson planning

Proiectul Internațional “Omul drag de la catedră”

Ediția a III-a 2018-2019

Concurs elevi. Simpozion Internațional dascăli

Inclus în CAERI, anexa 9 din OMEN nr. 3016/09.01.2019, poziția 1518

ISBN 978-606-725-262-0

Useful techniques for effective lesson planning

Teacher : Simin Lidia Nicoleta

School : Școala Gimnazială Nr. 1 sat Văleni

Adapting classroom materials and activities represents part of my daily work and throughout my teaching experience so far I have noticed that student motivation can be enhanced and as a result, the teaching/learning process can be facilitated and improved by planning my lessons in this way.

The syllabus is the personal plan of a teacher for his didactic activity, based on the requirements of the curriculum, the content of the textbook and the conditions imposed by the group of students. So, although there are many available materials to be used in the teaching/learning process, the textbook represents an important resource for the teacher and just like the curriculum, it should be a guide in writing the syllabus. Because the textbooks I use are not based on the requirements of the curriculum, my task as a teacher is to evaluate and adapt them by reorganizing the material in the lesson, reshaping some of the activities, supplementing a communicative approach and use of pairwork and groupwork in class or simply write new lessons in accordance with the curriculum. A teacher can use the textbooks in his school, even if they are old and are not totally based on the curriculum, by evaluating and adapting them, using the adaptation techniques described by many authors in their books, like Carlos Islam and Chris Mares in ‘Developing materials for language teaching’, 2003, p.91, 92 : adding: extending and expanding, deleting: subtracting and abridging, simplifying, reordering, replacing material, to meet the needs and abilities of his/her pupils.

Textbook: Pathway to English. English Scrapbook. Student’s book 7, authors: Alaviana Achim, Ecaterina Comisel, Felicia Dinu, Lorette Mastacan, Ruxandra Popovici, Elena Teodorescu; Oxford University Press, UK, 2002

In order to write a lesson plan and to introduce a new grammar structure, I decided to adapt both the tasks in the lesson ‘Are you good in a crisis’, page 76, from the textbook and the tasks from other materials, in order to facilitate understanding and get a positive feedback.

Replacing

The first technique I used was to replace exercises 1 a and b, one can see on the page above, with a funny activity, because I had already done a lesson on health and injury-related vocabulary, so they were unnecessary. Another reason is that I usually like to introduce new grammar structures through the inductive approach, from examples to the rules. My experience as a teacher has shown me that students focus much better on the new rules if they are introduced and explained in this way. Thus, before giving the examples to introduce the new rules, I thought of giving my students the opportunity to revise the past participle forms of the verbs, through a game called grammar pelmanism (see the description above, page 44). In the sixth grade students were asked to learn the past forms of the irregular verbs, when they were taught Past Simple Tense and many of them decided it would be easier for them in the future, to learn the past participle, too.

The students were grouped around a table and were given a set of cards with verbs with the infinitives and the past participles of the same verbs, one verb on each card. To make the game even funnier and to involve the weaker students, they worked in pairs within the group.

Activity 1: Spread the cards on the table face down and then take turns at picking up two cards at a time. The object is to find the past participle and the infinitive of the same verb. If the students in a pair pick up a matching pair of cards they keep it. If the two cards don’t go together, they must be replaced face down in the same place as they came from. Continue until all the cards have been picked up.

Reordering

I used exercise 2 b at the beginning of my lesson, in order to introduce Present Perfect Simple inductively and not to practise this tense as it is meant in the textbook, so before giving the rules and not after them. Thus, I have written the sentences correctly without using words in brackets. In order to help my students remember the vocabulary taught in the previous lesson and understand the sentences better, I kept the matching idea in the book.

Activity 2: Match the pictures with their descriptions: (the source of the photos: google-images)

1.   

2.

3.

4.     

 5.

1. The girl’s hand is red and swollen. A bee has just stung her.

2. The man’s finger is bleeding. He has just cut his finger.

3. The man’s leg is in plaster. He has broken his leg.

4. The woman’s arm has a purple mark on it. She has just bruised her arm.

5. This boy’s ankle is swollen and sore. He has just twisted his ankle.

Starting from these examples I asked my students questions in order to help them induce the form, meaning and place of the pattern and then I presented the structure, on the blackboard, as it appears in their textbook, in the Language focus, but using both the short and the long forms of the auxiliary verb. The presentation on the blackboard was accompanied by clear spoken models of the structure, being followed by a stage in which students repeated the examples individually.

Abridging and adding

Because grammar is not a strong point of my students I usually use a lot of exercises in order to help my students practise and understand the new structure. Discrete point techniques like dual-choice, blank completion or arranging elements help both my students, to drill the new structure in a controlled way, in order to get accustomed to it and me, to get a feedback whether my students understand the new item or not. That is why I decided to do exercise 2d in the textbook, based on questions and answers, during another lesson and add activities based on discrete point techniques. The students worked in pairs in order to feel more confident.

Activity 3: a. Underline the right answer:

1. She ………………….(twist) her ankle.

2. Your friend……………….(eat) something poisonous.

3. His sister…………………..(burn) her arm.

4. Her mother…………just………(cut) her finger.

b. Put the following words in the right order. (To be more interesting for the students, I prepared cards with these prompts in advance, using different colours for each sentence; the cards were put in envelopes and students had to work in groups and find the right order of the prompts to make correct sentences. After checking for correctness, they glued the prompts on a sheet of paper). 

1. ghost/ girl/ seen/ just/ has/ a/ the.

2. teacher/ has/ the/ left/ the/ just/ classroom.

3. the/ have/ bought/ we/ things/ for/ many/ party.

4. finished/ my/ I/ have/ homework/ just.

Changing the subject matter

Activity 4: In the production stage I thought of using another game called ‘Noughts and crosses’ and to adapt it by changing its subject matter to suit the purpose of the lesson. The words in the  grid were changed with verbs in the past participle that students had to introduce in sentences, using Present Perfect Simple. (see the description of the game above, pages 45,46)

brought	taken	lived
eaten	had	been
gone	left	arrived

Instead of playing ‘Noughts and crosses’, the weaker students were asked to fill in some blanks with ‘have’ or ‘has’, because some of them had problems with using them correctly. The second task was to translate those sentences in Romanian by using their dictionaries. They worked in group to do their tasks and when they finished we checked for correctness.

Any teacher can motivate his students if he knows them very well and understands their needs and preoccupations, in order to be able to select, adapt and design challenging, interesting and meaningful activities that could lead to students’ progress.