Ⅰ. Overview the lesson
I planed a lesson for final micro teaching in Methodology Ⅱ class. My lesson plan's objective is describing one's monster using the vocabulary related with our body part, such as eyes, legs, arms, noses, teeth with number. My student profile is 3rd graders in elementary school, and they already can do numbering in English.
In the warm up stage, I review the last lesson by counting number with fingering, and activate students' schema by asking 'Have you heard/seen a monster?' and miming about the word 'scary'.
In the presentation, I read a book 'What do you see?' with listening task, counting number with fingering. And the next listening task is to point out the partner's body part while I'm reading a book with motion.
In the guided practice, I planed a card game, the game is matching word cards of slash sentences to picture cards of body part.
In the independent stage, I planed a role play with the movie poster "Monster House" in pairs. We pretend that there are a monster house in our neighborhood and 2 children are about to visit the monster house. But one of them want to see a monster and isn't scared about the monster, so this child wants to draw a picture of the monster and show it to friends. On the contrary, another child is scared about the monster and don't want to see the monster. So another child asked to other child to see a monster and tell me, then I'll draw it. So one is speaking about a monster and the other is drawing what the partner say.
In the feedback and closure stage, I ask to students to describe other's monster and correct error about plural ～s, and I'll give a homework about word searching about the vocabulary that they learned.
Ⅱ. Theoretical Justification of the Activities
A. Right Hemisphere Participation
Because students’ age is young, they can't concentrate on the activities using logic. So I want to activate students' right hemisphere function. To do that students need various activities with are able to stimulate their emotion, artistic sense, sociability, creativity, imagination, visualization. Therefore I planed activities such as using movie poster, matching word cards to picture cards, counting number with fingering, and point out the partners' body while listening the story and those kinds of activities can be related to visualization. Also students need to draw a one's own monster so that can activate their creativity, artistic sense and sociability. And students imagine they are standing in front of the monster house in their neighborhood, so this activity can simulate their imagination.
B. The Affective Filter, Anxiety and Motivation
Affective frame work shows the relationship between emotions and CPH (Critical Period Hypothesis). It comes from ego psychology that we have our own ego and certain kinds of behavior can hurt our ego. We usually avoid because these kinds of behavior can be threaten to our ego. For instance, adults usually avoid the opportunity to use target language because they aren't good at that language, so they worry about being looked like foolish, because of their low language proficiency. On the contrary, children have flexible ego, so they usually don't have much anxiety producing target language. But if the teacher insists only correct, perfect answer strictly, even though children loose their interest. So in the lesson plan, I reflect the students' error and use choral repetition. These ways can reduce students' anxiety about producing the correct answer.
C. Input and Output
According to Krashen, input is essential thing to acquire language naturally; especially roughly tuned input is more effective to acquire target language than finely tuned input. In the lesson plan, I use lots of classroom language in English, so it's can be a good example of input. But I tried to focus on care giver speech, and the material is also focused on their current English proficiency, such as using children story book, simplifying sentence instead of using present perfect or complicate sentence. So these sorts of things can't satisfy the condition of roughly input.
On the contrary, according to the output hypothesis, only input isn't enough to acquire language. We need to practice target language such as speaking or writing. Producting target language (output) has several advantages over comprehension. Output gives opportunity to recognize one's own current level (what can I use or not) and also test their hypothesis (Is it right? or Can I use is?). So in the lesson plan, there are opportunity to use English such as classroom interaction, TSST, role play, making and speaking a sentence with given slash sentence word cards.
Ⅲ. Conclusion
In the lesson plan, by various kinds of activities, students can stimulate their right hemisphere. They can use their own imagination, creativity, artistic sense, building social relationship by activities such as, role play, TPR, drawing a picture, miming, and card game. Input is focused on the care giver speech. However roughly tuned input isn't enough. Using classroom interaction and doing role play can gives opportunity to the students to use English.
Submitted by Ji Eun
Posted by James Trotta at December 11, 2006 11:00 AMESL blog is one of many Blogs for learning English & teaching English. Translation services information.