My lesson final lesson plan for methodology Ⅱ is designed for intermediate-mid university students. The title is “When Don’t You Tell the Truth?” and the objective of this lesson is to teach students how to express their life experience using present prefect or past perfect tense. In the warm-up, students will tell about their personal experience of lying, and in the presentation, they will get main idea and find detailed information from the reading text. The reading text for presentation is an interview article from a youth magazine, and four people are talking about their experience of lying. In step 9, students write three sentences about their experience, and one of the three sentences should be a lie. Students will play a game finding out the lie. In step 10, students will write an email responding to an email of their friend who is in a dilemma where to tell the truth or not. By doing this writing activity, students are also expected to learn how to give their opinion. My lesson plan can be analyzed based on theories of SLA in terms of intrinsic motivation, risk-taking and Hypothesis Testing.
My lesson plan is pretty well designed to encourage students’ intrinsic motivation. Firstly, the topic for reading text contains conflicts because it is about telling a lie. In the reading text, we can read about interviewees’ opinion about telling a lie and situations that they faced dilemma whether to tell the truth or not. Secondly, the lesson plan includes lots of personal questions, in step 7 and 8, such as “What was your last lie?”, “What was the consequence of you lie?” and so on. Thirdly, it includes information gap in step 9 and opinion gap in step 10. In the controlled activity, students will write three sentences, and among those sentences, one has to be a lie. While doing this activity, students have to find which one is a lie. In independent activity, students will give their opinion to a friend who is in a dilemma to tell the truth or not by writing a replying email. Since, this lesson plan contains conflicts and opinion in reading material, asks students personalizing questions in step 7 and 8 and includes information gap and opinion gap in step 9 and 10, we can tell this quite well designed to stimulate students’ intrinsic motivation.
This lesson plan allows students take a risk to make mistakes. In the warm-up, the teacher does TSST and keeps calling on individual students in every step of this lesson plan. In the presentation, the teacher provides students chances to guess the meaning of new vocabulary items without looking up their dictionaries. The teacher also asks high level of questions here and there in the lesson. For example, before reading the text, the teacher asks students to infer the genre by looking at the form of the reading text and let them predict what is the text about from the title. In step 10, students write an email to a friend, but the email will be posted on the wall later. This is quite risky for the students. As I stated above, this lesson plan has some good points that let students take risks.
My final lesson plan needs some improvement in step 10 in terms of Hypothesis Testing. Students will generate their language in creative ways while they are writing an email, but this activity ends with posting students emails on the wall and getting comments from their classmates. So, they don’t have enough chance to get right form of language which will allow them to change their interlanguage system. If it included a step for teacher feedback on their writing, students will be able to produce better language. According to the viewpoint of Hypothesis Testing, students have to have chance to use newly learned language that is in the leading edge creatively first, then they also should have chances for getting feedback so that they can improve their language proficiency. So, I would like to revise this lesson plan later to add one more step for teacher feedback in step 10.
I’ve analyzed my lesson plan in terms of intrinsic motivation, risk-taking and Hypothesis Testing so far. It is pretty well designed to encourage students’ intrinsic motivation by giving students materials that contain conflicts and opinions, asking personalizing questions in step 7 and 8 and putting gaps in step 9 and 10. It allows students to take risk in many ways such as calling on students individually or letting students imagine the meaning of new vocabulary items. Although this lesson plan is pretty good based on many SLA theories, but it still requires some improvements in the viewpoint of Hypothesis Testing to let students reprocess their interlanguage system. So, I would like to revise my lesson plan by putting teacher feedback step in step 10 based on Hypothesis Testing to make the lesson plan better.
Submitted by Julie
Posted by James Trotta at December 12, 2006 4:15 AMESL blog is one of many Blogs for learning English & teaching English. Translation services information.