I. Overview of the lesson
This lesson is designed for my Methodology final lesson plan. The student profile is university students of the intermediate-mid level. During this lesson, they learn how to use the simple past tense – both regular & irregular verbs and wh-questions by reading of two postcards and practicing through the activities. By the end of this lesson, students should be able to talk about their past events and vacation and also write their own postcards using correct regular/irregular past tense verbs without the teacher’s assistance.
II. Theoretical justification of the activities
Risk-taking
In step 7, the teacher asks a question of ‘Where did you spend your last vacation?’ to individual students by T-S-S-T. If a student answers in a word such as ‘Gangwon-do’, the place only, the teacher makes him say in a complete sentence. Calling individual students would have students answer with high risk-taking especially if the student is very shy and not sure about their competence. And also asking a question to other students by T-S-S-T and answering in a complete sentence would make the students take risks, too. According to risk-taking theory which is one of SLA affective theories, teachers should push students to improve their language. If the students answered wrong, teachers need to encourage the students to take risks by cueing or positive feedback.
Output
According to the output theory, accuracy is more important than fluency. To improve accuracy, the students need to practice the language points that they have learned and teachers should correct the errors of the students. In this lesson, the students learn grammar, expressions and vocabulary in step 8 and practice using them a lot in step 9 and step 10 through two activities. In step 9, the teacher provides interesting pictures of two people’s vacation and make the students talk about what they did on their vacation using the given forms such as ‘have dinner’ and ‘go swimming’. In step 10, the teacher makes students write their own postcards. During the activity, the students would find that they don’t know the proper words for the words that they want to write. This is called ‘noticing gap’. Some students will ask the teacher or their classmates for help or some students will look for the dictionary to fill the gap. And also they test their hypothesis, which means what they think and select the words or expressions that they have acquired to create the postcards. However, they are not sure about what they write as the new forms are not their interlanguage yet. However, speaking and writing can make students acquired the forms finally.
Intrinsic motivation
To activate the intrinsic motivation, teachers should provide good materials which contain opinion, conflict, strong advice and controversy. These kinds of materials make students feel interesting and create their own ideas. I believe the reading material, the postcards used in this lesson is so interesting that students want to read and do the activities as topics such as traveling experience is interesting topic to university students. However, the extrinsic motivation is important, too. There is no extrinsic motivation is this lesson except a lot of positive feedback. I think rewarding would be effective and revise the lesson plan if possible.
III. Conclusion
I am sure that learning SLA theories in this SMU-TESOL would be very useful to all teachers. I am not a teacher yet but I will apply these theories to my future lesson plans a lot. But one thing that teachers should remember is that they should consider the student profile and motivation at first to make the lesson more effective. I have learned ‘interlanguage’ of students are all different. Teachers should carefully observe students to guide them to the final goal.
Submitted by Joy
Posted by James Trotta at December 16, 2006 8:41 AMESL blog is one of many Blogs for learning English & teaching English. Translation services information.