My lesson plan was designed to develop students’ competence of asking and answering the questions about experiences. The student level of proficiency is novice high, and they are mostly 13 to 15 years old. To meet the objective of this lesson, students are supposed to learn present perfect tense, which is challenging for them to acquire. So I use some materials to help them to understand better and easier like pictures, game board, worksheets for activities. In addition, I ask many personalizing questions to activate students’ schemata and do a T-S-S-T in warm-up. In presentation, students listen to the dialogue and get the main idea of the text which is about the English riddles but contains the target content language, namely present perfect tense. In step 9 and 10, students do some actual tasks such as board game, survey, drawing a graph and describing it. In these steps, students have many chances to communicate with others and to test their own language. In other words, my lesson plan made a good use of some influential theories like Input Hypothesis, Risk-taking and Hypothesis testing throughout my lesson plan.
Input Hypothesis is the one of the most favorable theories to be applied in the classroom. According to Input Hypothesis, the teacher should provide students comprehensible input, which means meaningful and authentic language. So I try to make my questions personalizing and to design the activities which facilitate students’ communicative competence. The questions shown in warm-up are “Have you ever been to an amusement park?” “When did you go to the amusement park?” and “Did you enjoy yourself?” These questions don’t focus on the target language but focus on drawing students’ experiences. The personalizing questions are not only meaningful to them but also helpful to bridge the lesson and students’ background knowledge. It’s definitely easy for them to understand the lesson. The other example of comprehensible input is the activity like survey in step 10. When students are carrying out a survey to find information on others’ experiences, they will be exposed to various meaningful languages from other students. To sum up this part, the languages and activities the teacher provides should be meaningful and authentic for students to understand the lesson better.
Risk-taking is another considerable theory when the teacher designs a lesson plan. Simply to say, students should take risks when learning a language. Otherwise, the errors they have will be fossilized without knowing they have errors. So the teacher’s job is to nicely push students to do actual tasks like asking and answering questions, reading and writing and so on. In my lesson plan, I always call on individual students. This might be stressful for them to say in front of others because they are not sure if their answers are right or wrong. But this is the right reason why I call on individuals because students should say something and also they can’t pretend to understood what the teacher says. To add to this, the students in step 10 are supposed to carry out a survey on different topics like country, food, some actions, and books. It means they can’t copy others’ and they should do something themselves. So the teacher should provide many chances for students to do actual tasks so that they take more risks.
The last one I emphasized in my lesson plan is Hypothesis Testing. Hypothesis Testing means that students can reprocess their incomplete interlangauge, namely leading edge, while communicating others. More specifically, students can select the form they are not confident with, experiment the form, think it again and finally make changes. In step 10 of my lesson, students survey others about their experiences. They possibly can use the target language correctly however, some students might not. The latter might say incomplete language in their leading edge just to communicate with others, in other words, to get and give some information. If their language is fortunately accepted by others, they probably use the language on and on. But if nobody understands them, they will be thinking what’s wrong with their language, watching others’ language, experimenting the new language influenced by others and making changes in their interlanguge at the end. To summarize, survey in step 10 gives students a chance to reprocess their language while struggling to communicate with others.
When I reflect my lesson plan, I think my lesson is well organized based on a few SLA theories. Input Hypothesis, Risk-taking and Hypothesis Testing are applied to my lesson plan. The students can get comprehensible input from the teacher and peers by asking and answering personalizing questions and by gathering information from other students. The teacher designed some actual tasks students can involve themselves and take risks in. Also, the survey in step 10 is an independent activity which lets students reprocess their language through trials and errors. However, there are still some parts which can be more improved and developed. The teacher should provide various materials to give more comprehensible input. In this lesson plan, main comprehensible input is asking personalizing questions but the teacher can enrich the input by letting them surfing on the net to find the experiences of others who have been to other countries. To sum up, many SLA theories have their own benefits and the teacher’s job is to create the lesson plan to satisfy various students by combining the beneficial theories and applying them appropriately in the lesson plan.
Submitted by Ann
Posted by James Trotta at December 11, 2006 5:12 AMESL blog is one of many Blogs for learning English & teaching English. Translation services information.