I. Overview of the lesson
This lesson plan is for a reading section. Its title is “The truth about lying.” The passage is about white lies. The student’s profile is they are university students, early 20s. They learn English for international communication 2 times a week for 1.5 hours. Their Language proficiency is Speaking: intermediate mid, listening: intermediate high, reading: intermediate mid and writing: intermediate low. The objective is at the end of the lesson, the students should be able to create sentence to make an own excuses for a situation and match their excuses with each title of the description. The reason why they learn English is students want to use English for everyday situations and purpose related to work, school, social life, and leisure. They would like to learn the second language more meaningfully and effectively through authentic communications. The Students’ language experience is they have learned English since middle school with focus on grammar knowledge. And reading skill is not bad but they are not accustomed to authentic materials. Most of the students do not have an experience to go abroad.
This lesson is designed to Communicative language learning. Students learn by an authentic reading passage in the step 8. They will have many classroom interactions and use classroom language. Through group work, learn English in an independent way and could develop their thinking skills to solve the task. Plus, they will have many opportunities to speak through guided practice in the step 9 and independent activity in the step 10.This lesson would make students learn English more interesting and concentrate on the lesson with an authentic situation. Materials are a passage for reading, a picture of some situation that a woman is telling a lie.
II. Theoretical justification of the activities.
A. The Right Hemisphere participation
In the step 8- presentation, the teacher uses a picture to make the students to visualize. At first, she shows them a picture that a woman is eating a food. Besides her, a chef is looking at her. She said, “It’s delicious”. But she doesn’t look she is enjoying the meal. The teacher shows students this picture then let students guess what is happening between the chef and the woman. In this part, students can understand easily even though they do not read the passage. They can imagine the situation with the picture.
In the step9- guided practice, students have an opportunity to use language creatively. The teacher gives students 4 situations to make white lies that students can encounter in the real life. Students make some white lies with their own words. In this part, students can use their right hemisphere to create language. It will make students use language in a meaningful way.
In the step 10- Independent activity, students should personalize to tell their own lies. The activity is the teacher let students close eyes. She says, “I will touch only a person. Students ask each other to find out the person. The person who got touched from me should make a lie to hide the fact.” In fact, the teacher will touch all students to let them tell lies. In this part, every student should tell a lie by making own story. They will use the language to personalize to hide the truth. In this part, they can use the right hemisphere to create the answer.
B. Intrinsic motivation
In the step6, this material could excite students because this material contains an opinion. The passage describes some situations that people often make white lies. There are 4 situations that people tell a lie and also 4 proper reasons for the lies. My students would like to read this passage because they frequently encounter those situations in life. Students can tell their opinions based on their own experiences that they agree or disagree with the reason of lies for the situations. However, I think there should be more visual materials to make improve. One picture is not enough to get motivated. If the teacher offers some video clips like movies or soap operas that shows similar situations, they would be excited in reading the text.
In the step 7~8, students could involve the lesson actively because the teacher asks questions about personal experience of telling lies. In step8, the teacher asks questions “ Have you ever told white lies? Or what kind of lies do you tell?” They would be personalized for answering those questions. By eliciting students’ personal answers, the students can be motivated to the lesson.
The experience gaps in the step 9 and opinion gaps in the step10 make the lesson motivating. Students’ task in the step 9 is make lies or excuses about the questions with given situations. “ Have you ever told lies in the situation? How will you say?” Then students answer is I say . In the step 10, students tell a lie for their own situation. However, I think if students should have role played in the step 10, it could make them more motivated because students could have imagination, experience, and information gaps by the role-play. It would be better to just tell a lie in a seat.
C. Risk Taking
In the step 7, the teacher asks a personal question to activate students’ schemata to each student to encourage risk taking. They do not have enough time to prepare the answer because the teacher’s question is “what was your recent lies?” They should think and answer immediately. They would say with errors and hesitate during speaking. However, the teacher would ask the same question to each student so the student who answer afterwards, would be taking low- risk. I think if the teacher asked different questions to an individual, the students could take risk.
In the step 8, the teacher lets students guess the unknown words to encourage risk taking. Students guess the words from the context by themselves. Then discuss with their partners. When the teacher checks the meaning of the words, the teacher does not say the answer directly. The teacher gives cues until they are close the meaning. Then the teacher asks students to create a new sentence with the words and tell them. It also would encourage risk taking to their students. When they make a new sentence, there would be grammatical errors or false using the words.
My suggestion of the lesson to encourage students’ risk taking, the teacher should have given more positive feedback. The teacher offers many opportunities to take risk taking, but there are fewer compliments. And sometimes, the teacher corrects error in a direct way and immediately. It would make students discourage. The teacher’s role to improve students’ language ability is make comfortable atmosphere. Plus, this students’ level are intermediate mid, so the teacher should have led them higher level of risk taking such as summarizing the passage or other’s lies. It could be helpful to the students.
III. Conclusion.
This lesson plan is designed to student-centered learning. Through this lesson, they could be motivated and interested in language learning. However, this lesson should have used more visuals and other activities to make students more involved. If I teach students according to this lesson, I will enhance the lesson based on those theories. Also as an English teacher, I should think over how I deal with the students to elicit their linguistic ability and enhance it to reach the next level. The theories absolutely benefit my class. My responsibility is how I adapt the theories to teach students and I should apply other theories what I learned from SLA class to my class as well. I think that is my duty and a crucial point.
Submitted by Sun Hee
Posted by James Trotta at December 16, 2006 8:26 AMESL blog is one of many Blogs for learning English & teaching English. Translation services information.