Overview of the lesson
The title of lesson is to “Find the Job That’s Right for You”. The profile of students is adults whose language proficiency is intermediate-mid. The target language is vocabulary words that are related to personalities such as practical, investigative, enterprising, conventional and routine and expressions such as “When I was a child, I thought I could…, but later I realized that I am a … type.” and if clause for giving advice. Students are going to brainstorm various personalities and think what job is right for some personality and discuss about their personalities and jobs in pairs in the warm-up stage. In the presentation stage, teachers give instruction about the reading and give time to guess the meaning of vocabulary words in group. They also learn expressions that they use in the guide practice. In the independent activity, students will do ‘Dear Abby’ writing activity. One person will be the counselor and the other one will be the person who has a problem. The handout, job pictures, cards, a sample letter for writing activity will be used.
Theoretical justification of the activities
Intrinsic Motivation
The materials are motivating because students have opinions about the lesson. The lesson is to find the job that’s right for your personality. They can have various opinions to match the job to the specific personality. For example, if students hear the word ‘investigative’, some student can imagine the detective as a matched job and another student can imagine the researcher. It means they have their own idea about the lesson and try to be active to have their own opinions.
In the step 7(Warm-up), the questions are personalized like “Do you think every person has different character?”, “What is your personality?”. Students discuss about their own personality and it is right for their jobs or not in pairs. Job is a good issue that most people consider, so students, especially adults, welcome to think about it. In the step 8(presentation), the teacher has to be careful not just giving instruction about the text. Students will get lose their attention, so I made a lesson plan to find main idea quickly and give short time to fill in the question paper. It might help students build their self-motivation. They will guess the vocabulary words in the text and match these personality words to jobs. They have opinions the reason they choose something.
In the step 9(Guided practice), students will pick one card among a deck of cards. There is a personality word in the cards. They can practice the expression that is “When I was a child, I thought I could…, but later I realized that I am a … type.”. If they practice just this sentence, they could get bored. Teachers have to give time limit to make a full sentence. In the step 10(Independent activity), students will do “Dear Abby” writing activity in pairs. There could be a partially opinion gap. If one person writes down his/her problem and 3-4 people counsel the problems, it could have more opinion gaps because person who has a problem decide whose opinion (counseling) is helpful.
Risk-taking
In the step 7, the teacher asks personal question individually or T-S-S-T for students to encourage risk-taking. If they make errors, the teacher corrects the errors naturally. Don’t let them think they are silly. You can memorize students’ names, make classroom environment friendlier and help students to use classroom language when they don’t know the answer such as “Can you give me a hint?” instead of turning to classmates for help.
In the step 8, one student can’t answer the question and ask another classmate for help. If it happens, after another classmate answers, the teacher has to ask the student who couldn’t answer again to check comprehension. It encourages the student to take the risk more easily.
In the step 10, students have to do “Dear Abby” free-writing activity. Some students will be counselors and some students will be people who have problems. They can write down every problem that can be real or imaginary and counselors give any opinions to them. During this writing activity, students will take risk like grammatical errors or weird words use. After finishing the activity, some of them will read their writing in front of the classmates. It encourages students to take risk more and more.
Conclusion
I analyze the theories with my final lesson plan. When I made the final lesson plan, I didn’t consider what questions or activities are helpful for students or not, but I learned it to analyze my final lesson plan by myself. It is the good time to think how methodology and SLA are related and how I lead the class more actively. There are many good elements like intrinsic motivation, risk taking, input and output and so on. I believe that it is the most important thing to choose the text that elicits students’ motivation.
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Posted by James Trotta at December 15, 2006 9:25 AMESL blog is one of many Blogs for learning English & teaching English. Translation services information.