I. Overview of the lesson
This lesson is designed for intermediate-mid university students and there are 12 students in this class. The topic of this lesson is “art of complaining.” Through the lesson, the students will learn how they can describe their annoyances by using proper vocabulary items and expressions. As the text, the students will read a complain letter which is describing the writer’s complaints about a bad hotel. The students should answer focus questions with the reading by using some reading strategies such as predicting, skimming and scanning. After completing the reading task, the students will learn and practice the expressions and vocabulary for describing complaints in step 9, guided practice. Then they will write a complain letter by their own with the given information as an independent activity. Finally, have the students post their writing on online discussion board for peer evaluation.
II. Theoretical justification of the activities
A. Right hemisphere function
This lesson is designed to encourage using the right hemisphere function of brain by utilizing visual support and personalizing questions. In the warm-up stage, students will brainstorm in groups about their everyday annoyances. And at the presentation and guided practice stage, students will perform tasks based on their own annoyances in their daily life. I believe this way is meaningful for the students because the students might use their right hemisphere function with their personal emotions. In addition, I designed to use some visual support and it’s another way to activate right hemisphere function.
B. The affective filter, anxiety and motivation
In the warm-up stage, the students will answer several personalized questions without pressure to lower their anxiety. In addition lots of classroom interactions and individual questions to the students are planned to encourage the students to be active. Personalized questions can be the way of motivating the students also. Finally, I have the students to write a letter and post their writing on the online discussion board to give some facilitative anxiety and motivate the students at the same time. However the class designed not to provide too much pressure to the students by let the students edit each other without grading.
C. Input and output
For comprehensible input, this lesson is using an authentic complain letter as reading text. Through the authentic reading text, I expect the students to acquire “i + 1” while they are performing their reading tasks. However, I also designed several ways to encourage students’ output. During the class the teacher will call on some students to summarize the instructions. When they summarize, they might make some errors such as articles, possessive s or third person singular s. So they may notice their gap by themselves and try to overcome in. In addition, because the independent activity is writing a letter, they can test what they learn with the activity. In conclusion, I tried to balance input and output together to build up students’ competence.
III. Conclusion
The goal of EFL class is building up the students’ competence. Therefore, I tried hard to help the students to improve their communicative ability in English. This lesson is a kind of reading and writing class basically. Hence I put lots of classroom interactions in order to have the students to speak and listen during the lesson because they might have little chance to practice those skills during reading and writing activities. However, it was still difficult to find a way to encourage all the students participate in the lesson actively. I believe the teachers should design the lessons with considering all the well-known methodology and second language acquisition theories together and they should be balanced. In addition, I think more visual support materials and lots of classroom interactions are essential fact of successful class, so I want to try to develop those materials also.
Submitted by Ray
Posted by James Trotta at December 16, 2006 8:24 AMESL blog is one of many Blogs for learning English & teaching English. Translation services information.