In my writing lesson plan, the topic was invitation and how to write a reply letter. I showed real wedding invitation card to the students and asked what we need that for. Students could have idea about the invitations and I pre-taught them 4 new vocabulary items like ‘pop the question’, ‘bursting’, ‘blowout’ and ‘RSVP’ that are shown on my invitation poster. As those vocabulary items were interesting and somewhat related to them around at their age, students got interested and had fun. Then I introduced a controlled activity as step 9, which was information gap, with giving instruction such as forming team, time limit and how to fill in the gap. I tried to use as much classroom interaction techniques as I could while doing comprehension check. Once they finished filling the gap by asking each other I asked one student to come up to the front and made him read loudly what he completed to the class. Step 10 was for writing a reply letter to host in polite way. I elicited writing prompts like form, audience, topic and purpose from the students and made them to elaborate each. Then they were taught why they need to write a reply to host and why it needs to be polite. 3minutes were allowed to think whether they can go or not and blanked paper was provided.
First of all, I think the topic was appropriate for the students since some of them are going to marry right next month and they were interested in expressions like ‘pop the question’ and ‘propose’ a lot. To increase students’ intrinsic motivation I introduced real wedding invitation cards with specific information on it and made one of them large to put on the board so that everybody could see that. Students even liked poster more than real one. Sometimes showing image like pictures or posters is more effective than just talking about it to activate students’ right brain functions. As they were taught new vocabulary, they were encouraged to make sentences with them by themselves. They asked each other “Did you pop the question to your wife?” and answer like “No, my wife popped the question then…”. By then, they were motivated to make invitations on their own as they were taught on the poster. Even though the form of invitation was fixed in step 9 and only some blanks were given to them, students were eager to fill in the gaps by helping each other.
In addition, before getting into the step 10, I asked a lot of questions to remind them of the previous lesson. They already learned writing prompts before and could understand what the important writing factors are. I knew that writing lesson easily can be bored and might be difficult for students in some way, so I decided to give them enough time to think and share each other’s idea for writing first. Such risk-taking has positive and negative effects on their language learning. Proper risk taking encourages students to get some tension and make them alert on what they’re doing. But extreme risk-taking, however, could cause negative result. Trying to write something in their own language was adequate risk taking activity for the students and they actually tried hard to make it, even though they felt difficult while doing that. Also students seemed like feel comfortable when they do group work instead of speaking to whole class. These examples represent how important for the teacher to adjust the degree of risk-taking and to encourage students to do better.
Finally, it’s important to integrate 4 skills when we plan an effective lesson so that students could develop all their skills properly and have confidence in language learning. T-P-S was a good idea to activate their background knowledge for independent writing. Variety of classroom interactions was beneficial to give students enough input and to make input comprehensible in many ways. Also we can expect much more student- generated language from that and it also can be a good chance for the teacher to notice students’ progress and what kinds of problem they have when some errors are detected. For example, I noticed that some of students in my class were having trouble to use some verbs correctly in certain sentences. Someone said, “I’ll make him to marry.” Other students said, “I’ll let her to go.” Those were overusing ‘to’ where it shouldn’t be used. I sometimes corrected them but they still made same errors. It was a good chance to teach the students those verbs that need to use original form after objective intensively. I let the students repeat what I said and practice those by drilling.
In conclusion, my lesson worked well as much as the students and I enjoyed. I tried most to make the lesson communicative and authentic. However, it would be more effective, if I gave the students enough time to think alone, share with the partner before actually begin the independent writing. They might need some more input or source to activate their background knowledge or think more creatively so that they could’ve done better writing. I also didn’t write down important things from what I said on the board and that made the students confused. For example it would have been better if I put “I’ll let you go.” And “I’ll make you marry him.” for the students and use them when I did drilling. Also it was important for the students to make their errors reprocessed in their language system. I should have encouraged them to correct it by themselves and allowed time to revise the errors since the students can learn effectively when they’re aware of errors that they made and try to reprocess it by themselves.
Submitted by Eunice
Posted by James Trotta at December 9, 2006 6:08 PMESL blog is one of many Blogs for learning English & teaching English. Translation services information.