I.Overview of the lesson
My students are in intermediate low level in speaking and writing and they have a little higher proficiency-intermediate mid in reading and listening. They are all adults and have studied for about over 10 years, but they have trouble with communicating in English because they don’t have much opportunity to use English out side of the class. I prepared the text ‘Santa Claus in the 21st Century’ with abundant materials such as pictures, video on the wed site, worksheet, to make input comprehensible. The task and functions in the lesson is to describe a place or situation by finding the information gap in different pictures and writing their own story. In step 8, I present passive-voice by giving examples and make them practice. Through activities step 9 and 10, students are able to use the passive sentences appropriately without the teacher’s assistance.
II. Theoretical Justification of the activities
A. Intrinsic motivation
Students get intrinsic motivation because they are interesting through personalizing the topic. For example, in step 6, worksheet which is one of materials is given to students. In the worksheet, students have to advice about the interesting place visitors should visit in the Santa Claus Village. It can motivate students to internalize the topic. In the warm-up, I try to activate schemata by asking personal questions such as “Have you ever been to the Santa Claus Village?”, “What’s the most impressive place you’ve visited before?”, etc. These questions make students feel excited because they think that the topic is relevant to them. In step 9, the information gap motivates students. They describe their own pictures and try to find the differences. This activity can be more interesting than describing the same picture.
B. The Affective Filter and Facilitative Anxiety
I try to be balance in adjusting the anxiety not to be too high or too low. So I make students reduce their anxiety to be easy to pick up the target language, but sometimes facilitate the anxiety to participate more. For example, in warm-up part, I ask interesting personal questions to relieve them such as “How’s your feeling” or “Do you have any special plan on Christmas?” When they answer these questions, I just listen and give a positive feedback, not correct the errors. However, in step 8 or 9, I check the comprehension many times by calling on the student individually. When he/she makes the error, I have them correct the error. At the end of the lesson, I give them homework to review what they learn and prepare the next lesson. But the homework is not supposed to be so hard because students have too much anxiety. If so, their performance might go down.
C. Output
I ask my students to speak or write because I can find the problem while they speak or write. If they have trouble in using the new target language, I provide them with the language that they need. For example, when I present the grammar-passive voice, I ask students to change the active sentence to the passive one. If they have difficulty in making a proper form, I help them by modeling or giving the other examples. In step 9, students describe the picture by speaking with the partner. When they practice in pairs, I make the error such as “You omitted ‘be verb’.” or “Please use the correct verb with present perfect tense.” In step 10, students write a story about their best Christmas with more than 5 passive sentences. By observing their writing, I can decide to move on the next or not. Also I give chance them to try new language with leading edge by giving the instruction like “you don’t need to write all sentences with passive voice.” So they can decide what they want to write.
III. Conclusion
In conclusion, students are able to acquire the target language more effectively by giving a strong motivation, adjusting the degree of anxiety to students and give lots of chance to produce. Personalizing topic and information gap in the activity motivates to them, but I want to add the supplementary text t which includes more opinions about the Santa Claus Village such as the suggestion written by visitors on the website. In step 8, it’s better to provide them with more various examples by modeling or cueing to make input comprehensible. Also, I think that I try not to talk too much. Rather, students should speak as much as possible to reach a communicative goal. Therefore, teacher’s role is very important to lead students to acquire the language successfully as a facilitator.
Submitted by Ji Hyun
Posted by James Trotta at December 12, 2006 10:52 AMESL blog is one of many Blogs for learning English & teaching English. Translation services information.