I. Overview of the lesson
My students are the twelve 5th graders who’ve been studying English for 1 year in private institute. .Their speaking and listening proficiency levels are novice high whereas reading and writing levels are novice med. The students are active young learners and enjoy talking and playing in English. However, they get easily distracted. The target language of the lesson is positional words such as in, on, and under. The materials are text, pictures, worksheets and realia.
The lesson title is “Where is the Bobby’s cap?” Objectives are the students should be able to use positional words which are introduced in the text to make sentences in given context. Also realia and pictures are shown in warm-up step. In presentation step, students learn the positional words using the picture of a room and make target language personalized to students for example, they introduce their own room using positional words. In step 9, students fill in the blanks using target words and in step 10, as pair work students work with their partner to find the difference between theirs and partner picture with only asking and questioning each other. TSST and lots of comprehension checks are used in over all steps for making input comprehensible.
II. Theoretical justification of the activities
A. Right hemisphere participation
Language learning is related to the brain function. My students are about to begin their puberty stage thus, their brains have not completed the lateralization process. Students use right side of their brain for language acquisition while they are easy to be distracted during the class. Therefore, it is very important for the students to provide contexts which can stimulate their brain related to the language function as well as retain their motivations and interests without distractions. Thus, I choose students’ intact environment, students’ room as authentic contexts. In the warm-up step, preview the texts for the class and relevant realia will be introduced in order to activate students’ schemata., in the step 9-10, students may feel that they are fully participating in the class through the pair work activity.
B. The affective filter, anxiety and motivation
During the class, students are asked to make a question by using TSST. For the students who may hesitate to speak or are not able to perform, proper assistance from teacher is provided. However, it does not mean that I always model the examples. Rather, I provide a clue and meaning of the words (as a hint) so that the students can feel less nervous and be encouraged to try the given task. Right after the students’ performances, providing positive feedback is very important in learning of young students like mine. Even though they make mistakes, I give him/her a big applause or the other type of exaggerated positive feedbacks. Through the learning experiences, students may obtain the self-rewarding feeling of achievement, may not be afraid to take risks later on and in turn, may develop self-motivation for their future learning.
My lesson plan also emphasis on participations of all of the students. For example, in both the warm up and presentation steps, students are called individually to answer the questions for the comprehension checks. In step 9’s activity, students should fill in the blanks with what their partners say. Since the students have to fill in the blanks, students may have to pay more attention to what they are listening to and focus on their writing accuracy. Those combined activities can facilitate students’ anxiety and motivation for better performance.
In presentation step, students learn the target language-positional words as personalizing language. I explain the positional words and then ask student to describe their own room using the target vocabulary. Students may feel great interest in listening the other students’ descriptions on their rooms, and may get excited while they are waiting for their turn to talk about their own room to others. In turn, this series of class room interaction motivate students to practice the target words.
In the step 10, through the activity “find the difference,” students can get intrinsic motivation because this activity is performed with partners. While they are finding the differences on their picture, almost all the students try to find the more differences and faster than their partner. They get a kind of competitive feelings to each other in this activity. It motivates students to participate in the activity by making a question and answer their partner enthusiastically.
C. Input and Output
As a caregiver speech, in presentation and warm up step, I use lots of comprehension checks to make input comprehensible. In presentation step and step 9, students get error corrections when they made error by repetition or correct answer form in white board. In step 10, students are encouraged to ask questions and answers with each other by finding the difference of picture, students not only use the positional words that they learned in the lesson but also try to express their pictures to their partner with other positional words which they have not learned yet. I monitor their language and what they need to learn. And I can apply them to next lesson.
III. Conclusion
My lesson plan for the 5th graders, “Where is the Bobby’s cap?” is about the using positional words. In the lesson plan, the right hemisphere participation, the affective filter, anxiety and motivation, and input and output hypothesis were applied. By choosing students’ intact environment as the contexts to motivate and retain their learning interest/motivations, the right hemisphere participation was applied in my lesson plan. Hence, emphasis on the positive rewards to students, students’ participation, paired activities and competitive activities supports the affective filter, anxiety and motivation. Also, the adopting lots of comprehension checks, error correction in white board, and monitoring students’ words and incorporating the results into the future lesson plan support input and output hypothesis in my lesson plan.
Submitted by So Youn
Posted by James Trotta at December 11, 2006 5:48 AMESL blog is one of many Blogs for learning English & teaching English. Translation services information.