Summary of the lesson
My lesson is designed for adult learners who are at intermediate high in speaking, listening and reading and intermediate mid in writing. The topic is a cosmetic surgery and the materials include some visuals such as a poster, hand-outs and laminated scripts. In warm-up, they are going to mainly discuss ‘good-looks’ in groups. In presentation, they will be listening to a conversations talking about a cosmetic surgery and answering 4 focus questions. Then, they are going to learn several vocabulary items and one grammar rule introduced in the text within its context. In the three following activities, a game using laminated strips, a role-play and a discussion, students have more change to practice what they learn in warm-up and presentation. The students can practice a certain grammar form, unreal conditionals- ‘if I past verb, I would…’- in the game using laminated strips. In the next activities, a role-play and a discussion, students have more freedom to say what they want. They are going to talk about the topic, a cosmetic surgery in both a role play and a discussion.
II. Analysis
Right –hemisphere participation
Krashen insists that adult learners should learn language as children do. One obvious thing observed in children’s language learning is ‘right-hemisphere participation’ such as helps from emotion, sociability, imagination, which are hardly seen in adults’ language learning. To encourage adults to use their right brain functions, I use visual supports in warm-up. When pre-teaching vocabulary, I show the students a poster of a figure saying a sentence that contains the target vocabulary items so that I can help them imagine and visualize the real situation that the words can be used. Also, as an independent activity, I designed ‘role-play.’ By doing a role-play, the students will imagine the situation, interact with partners and picture the figures and to do so, their brain functions should be used a lot.
Risk-taking, facilitative anxiety
In affective theories of SLA, it is said that the students who are willing to take risks are more successful learners. Also, facilitative anxiety helps learners acquire language more successfully, though it is different form Krashen’s point of view. There two factors, risk taking and facilitative anxiety are related to each other because when students try to take risks, there usually comes facilitative anxiety. To form facilitative and encourage students to take more risks in my class, I am using lots of classroom interactions more risky to students. For example, TSST is more risky than brainstorming. Also, I often call on an individual student to answer aloud. At the same time, to prevent the anxiety from being debilitative, I often help students get the right answer by cueing, reflecting and lots of positive feedback.
Intrinsic motivation
In SLA affective filter theories, intrinsic motivation is more valued than extrinsic motivation as it helps students become more eager for learning. To help students have intrinsic motivation, it is said that the topic should contain controversy, conflict, opinion or advice, that there should be personalized questions in presentation and that there should be gaps in follow-up activities. In my lesson the topic is a cosmetic surgery, which is quite controversial and brings up lots of different opinions. Also, in presentation I ask students what they would advice to the character who appears in the listening if they were her friends. In other words, students are asked to give their personal opinions. In activities, students are doing a role-play and a discussion. The two activities are classic examples that have imagination, experience and opinion gaps. Therefore, students’ intrinsic motivation will be stimulated.
III. Conclusion
This lesson concerns mainly the two points in SLA theory, right-hemisphere participation and affective theories, especially the risk taking & facilitative anxiety and intrinsic motivation. To help students benefit form right-brain functions, visual supports and an activity, the role-play are included. To encourage students to take more risks with facilitative anxiety, classroom interactions such as cueing or TSST are used and lots of positive feedbacks are given to students. For the last, to stimulate the students’ intrinsic motivation, a controversial topic is chosen and personalizes questions and information, imagination, experience and opinions gaps are given to students in presentation, step 8 and activities.
Submitted by Esther
Deciding on whether you want cosmetic surgery or not is a big choice, so before you get some plastic surgery make sure that you spend time researching your plastic surgeon to make sure they don't have a big backlog of complaints like some cosmetic surgeon firms do.
A tummy tuck can be performed together with liposuction to get the best result out of a body contouring surgical procedure done by board-certified plastic surgeons.
Proficiency level: intermediate low or mid
Grade: 5~6 year
Number: 10
Hour: 50 minutes
Experience degree: They have been studying English for 2~3 years with native speakers, thus they are not hesitant in communication, but when speaking, they make often mistakes. They need accuracy.
Ⅰ.Overview of the lesson
The lesson was designed by practicing Present Perfect Tense. In the warm up, I asked them to have been to other countries like ‘Have you been or visited other countries?’ Usually, they said as only “Yes”, not completing sentences. I asked again “where countries have you been before?” They said only the name of countries. Or they answered like “I went to Paris.” At the same time, whenever I asked, I put the questions on the board emphasizing on the expression ‘have been’ or ‘have visited’
In the presentation, first, I gave the reading text about the Europe travel to them. Ss were supposed to find out some answers for scanning in the reading text. And then, I explained what the present perfect tense is, they practiced several times how to make the tense, being providing examples. Lastly they wrote one paragraph writing in accordance with each experience, applying the tense.
II. Theoretical justification
Acquisition and Learning
First, after sharing about trips to other countries, they start to recognize differences between the past and the present perfect tense. However when explaining the rule, they felt hard again. They tended to takes notes the rule and examples but they didn’t understand how the rule is related to the tense. Second, through scanning, they answered naturally what they figured out. Based on the text, we asked and answered each other without consciousness of the tense. But I let them change the given Korean questions in English. They tried to focus on the rule but it took for a few times to answer. Third, they enjoyed writing their experience to visit other countries. Sometimes they made mistakes to follow the rule, but they could fix right away. I think, in the end, they could understand and use the rule, connecting to what they already knew. But, even though they practiced the rule a lot, I was asking them to explain it next time, they couldn’t justify about it.
Risk-taking
Though my Ss have no fear speaking in English, when facing new language rules, they avoid speaking to the class. I tried to ask them to response indirect questions in relation to the rule, such as ‘Have you been to Africa?’, not ‘Do you know the present perfect tense?’ It is because they are familiar with speaking freely. Second, although they are conscious to accept rules from the beginning, if speaking or writing to the class, they got chance to fix mistakes, like I have ‘aten’ pasta in Italia. The S was too much aware of making participle. At once he could change it appropriately, after getting my cue.
Output
My Ss are willing to learn English. They usually have confidence in dealing with speaking, even their languages are not complete sentences. The reason that they learn grammar is to have more accuracy. The Present Perfect Tense that exits in English is not corresponding to the Korean tense. However they keep on practicing even without being explaining rules. When learning the tense, they got the gap between the past and the present perfect tense. It isn’t consistent to use them separately. Through practicing several examples in speaking, they recognize how different they are. If they had taken test about the rule, they could not have used it. The process of writing one paragraph, using the rule, they made sure how to apply the language use exactly.
Ⅲ. Conclusion
The strength that I covered in the lesson are the warm up part, some ways of dealing the text and letting them write one paragraph. First, I introduced them to ask their travel experiences to other countries. Thus they paid attention to the class easily and they started to understand the content in relation to each experience. Second, the questions for scanning that I intended with the given tense were helpful to understand the tense. I let them produce to be sure their understanding, according to the text. It gave a chance them to make mistakes, at the same time they got to fix it. Third, writing one paragraph using the tense, they got to internalize the rule. It is because the task was clear to apply to their real experiences.
The weakness is to do explain the rules automatically. I wanted them to recognize differences between the past and the given tense. But I think this trial caused more hard to understand it. I let them translate Korean into English. In the long run, this task was focused on not language use but the usage. It means this is not for production, so it is less helpful way to use the target language.
Submitted by Judy
In today's culture teaching English as a second language is a very important job.
I. Overview of the lesson
Lesson Title: Harry Potter from
Student Profile: 2nd grade of middle school, Intermediate Low
Target Language: Vocabulary items relating to reading article/ creating an invitation card
Materials: Reading articles/ Hand out
Step7 (Warm Up)
*Teacher starts a class by asking, “What is your hobby? “ to activate students’ schema
* Teacher makes students answer the question using T-S-S-T and visualize the answers on the board.
* Teacher asks more questions such as “Does anybody know what a novel is? “, “ What is the characters’ name in novel that you have read or heard about?”
* Students think about the characters’ name in novel by T-P-S
* Teacher visualizes the answers on the board.
Step8 (Presentation)
* Teacher introduces that students are going to read an advertisement of a novel.
* Teacher gives students a reading material.
* Teacher let students gist the main idea of the reading articles by T-P-S.
* After T-P-S, teacher let student summarize the main idea.
* Teacher gives students 3 focus questions and asks the answers using T-S-S-T.
* Teacher gives students hand out to practice vocabulary items of the reading material. This includes “boring”, “uneventful”, “exciting”, and “eventful”.
* Teacher checks students’ feedbacks asking, “ Do you want to read the novel, Harry Potter? Why? or Why not? “
Step9 (Controlled activity)
* Teacher gives students handout and students have to fill out the blanks in it to summarize the story by T-P-S.
* Students do storytelling with their partners.
* Teacher gives students another handout and students have to sequence the given sentences by T-P-S.
Step10 (Independent activity)
* Teacher introduces the activity, “ Creating an invitation card for Harry”.
* Before writing, Teacher let students know what kind of information can be included in the heading, the body and the closing asking questions “ What would you like to start this card? “, “ How could you conclude this card?” “ What kind of information can be included in the body?”
* Give students 15 minutes for creating an invitation card for Harry.
II. The theoretical justification of the activities
A. Input Hypothesis
Teacher gives meaningful questions. Teacher starts the class asking, “ What is your hobby? “ and “ What is the characters’ name in novels you have read or heard about? “ in step7. Also, teacher asks, “ Do you want to read the novel, Harry Potter? Why or Why not? “ in step8. Those are all personalized questions and questions starts from closed type to open type.
Teacher uses an authentic material. Teacher uses an advertisement of a novel as a reading material in step8 and this material is roughly tuned input; because this includes not only the target language (i) but also only +1 languages.
Students ask and answer the questions and these question and answers are roughly tuned input. Students share ideas about the characters’ name of the novels by T-P-S in step7 and gist the main idea by T-P-S in step8. Also, students summarize and sequence the story using T-P-S in step9.
B. Affective theory: Risk Taking
T-S-S-T is found in step7 and step8. Students have to ask, “ What is your hobby? “ and answer it in step7. They have to ask on focus questions and answer them in step8. So, students should listen carefully what the other students are saying and answer it considering the correctness of the form and message.
Individual student predicts the title of reading material, gusts the main idea, then summarize it in step8. Students have to sequence the given sentences in step9 as well. In addition, students have to create an invitation card by themselves in step10. Students have to take higher risk gradually throughout step8, step9 and step10.
C. Neurological factors: Right hemisphere participation
This lesson includes group activities. T-P-S activities are found in step7, step8 and step9. Also, storytelling activity is found in step9. To perform these activities, students have to ask and answer to share ideas using target language and language that they have learned.
Students have to stand ambiguity. Students have to predict the title of the reading material, gist the main idea and summarize them in step8. Students have to stand the uncertainty but it gives students chances to practice their languages.
III. Conclusion
This lesson applies 3 theories. They are Input Hypothesis, Risk Taking and Right Hemisphere Participation. In step7, this lesson plan accounts for Input Hypothesis using meaningful question and T-P-S and Risk Taking using T-S-S-T. In step8, this lesson plan accounts for Input Hypothesis applying an authentic materials, T-P-S activity and Right Hemisphere Participation using predicting, gist and summarizing. Finally, Risk Taking using T-S-S-T. In step9, this lesson plan supports Input Hypothesis and Right Hemisphere Participation applying storytelling and T-P-S activity and Risk Taking using sequencing the story. In step10, this lesson applies Risk Taking choosing creative writing.
If this lesson plan includes visuals in step7, this can activate students’ schema more effectively. Teacher can prepare the pictures of characters in novels.
Submitted by Janet
I. Overview of the lesson
Generally, all children like not only singing songs and dancing to music, but also watching musicals. My students are 6 years old in Korean age and are introduced to various kinds of musicals in musical class. One day, I demonstrated a scene from a musical. At the beginning of the lesson, I introduced a song with the lines I taught in the lesson. The learners liked the song and movements because the gestures looked very funny. I acted out some dialogue with a hand puppet about getting a stomachache from eating too much ice-cream.
The situation was very familiar to the students, and lines in the scene were not too difficult for them. As a result, they were interested in my presentation. I checked their comprehension and then had them repeat chorally and individually in order to memorize the lines. Next they were supposed to practice target expressions with a partner. They had the chance to both ask and answer one time. I asked how they felt when their friends or family were sick, how they felt when they had a stomachache, and what they can say to their friends or family when they have a stomachache.
II. Theoretical justification of the activities -Risk taking
In this lesson, T-S-S-T was employed to force students to take risks in the warm-up and presentation. My young learners don’t have the ability to express their opinions fully in English. Therefore, I often use T-S-S-T in class in order to get the students accustomed to taking risks and asking and answering questions by themselves without excessive fear of misspeaking.
My students are familiar with the T-S-S-T method and are often given the opportunity to take chances with their second language. In the warm-up, I put them in a position to take some risks. I demonstrated the following scene from the target musical consisting of dialogue between myself and a hand puppet:
Me: “Ouch! Ouch!”
Puppet: "What's the matter?"
Me: "I have a (stomachache)."
Puppet: “Why?”
Me: “Because I (ate too much ice cream).”
Puppet: “You should (stop eating ice-cream).”
Me: “Okay!”
I then posed the question, “Where am I sick?” The students were then asked to pose the same question to their classmates and answer with the target phrase “You (have a stomachache).” We then proceeded in the same way with 5 additional scenarios involving the vocabulary: “headache,” “toothache,” “itch,” “feel dizzy,” and “sunburn.”
Higher level questions were utilized in the presentation to lead the students to be successful language learners. I struggled to stimulate the students to express their opinions using the language targets; “What’s the matter?”, “Because I have…”, and “You should…” I asked the students some higher-level questions, such as: “How do you feel when you have a stomachache?”, “What can you say to your friends when they have a headache?”, and “What should you do when you have a toothache?” Some high risk-takers wanted to answer the questions but just raised their hand and couldn’t use the target expressions.
To control the activity, I gave positive feedback to the students who were successful and to those who were helping their classmates and negative feedback to students who raised their hands excitedly, but had no answer. Also, there were some students who were not willing to gamble at all with the activity. I tried to help by giving them confidence through cueing them to produce the desired response.
The opportunity to guess words was in the presentation so that the students could interact with the new vocabulary. I provided the target vocabulary based on illness such as; “headache,” “sunburn,” “toothache,” “itch,” and “dizzy.” Some vocabulary items, such as: “headache” and “stomachache” were familiar to them, but they had difficulty understanding the meaning of “sunburn.” I tried to convince them to tolerate the ambiguity of the unfamiliar word. However, they had a lot of difficulty getting past their inability to grasp this new vocabulary. As a result, I showed gestures and facial expressions to the students to try to help them. This was somewhat effective to encourage the students to predict the meaning of the words, but not enough. So I translated the new vocabulary into Korean to help them understand more fully.
After the class was finished, I reviewed the lesson and thought of one suggestion to help the students’ learning: if I had used pictures to demonstrate illnesses, the students would have understood the new target vocabulary, such as “sunburn,” “sun cream,” and “diet” much more easily.
III. Conclusion
According to the theory of Risk-Taking, the teacher should provide some opportunity for failure to the students and let them adventure with the target language. To follow it, I employed T-S-S-T, the higher level questions, and guessing words in this lesson.
In addition, the teacher should keep in mind the features of the low risk-takers and encourage them to produce correct answers without too much extended pressure. So I chose methods like cueing, modeling, chunking, and correcting errors.
Also, if the high risk-takers interrupt the class too much and exert a bad influence on their classmates, the educator should control them to speak or write with appropriate language.
Submitted by Mi Hee
I. Overview of the lesson
This lesson is designed for the Intermediate-low 6th grades Elementary school students who go institutes three times a week. Most of students are exposed to a variety of topics in order to maintain their interest in English learning also students are eager to learn English as their parents emphasize the importance of learning English all the time. Main focus in my lesson was that students make their own top five lists what they enjoy doing. In the warm up stage I asked students some questions to activate their schemata about their sleeping habits for teaching some key words which are related to sleeping habits. I did TSST a lot for leading all students participate to the class. Then in the presentation stage, I asked students some questions for identify genre. I used internet web page to find out the genre. I also gave some focus questions before do reading Test for helping students' understanding. In the guided practice stage, I gave some activities, one is fill in the blank from the keywords and make their own list about their top five things what they enjoy doing.
II. Theoretical justification of the activities
A. Intrinsic Motivation
Intrinsic motivation is cognitive way. It means desire to perform an activity because it's interesting not because of anticipating rewards. As far as Intrinsic Motivation concerned, students learn better and want to do something voluntarily if they are interested in what they are learning. I asked some questions in step 7 to activate their schemata and also for leading their interests. For example, I asked about their sleeping habits because my topic was top five sleepiest animals in the world. Most of animals don't exist in Korea, so students will be interested to see them even through the pictures. In step 9, I asked students to make their own top five lists what they enjoy doing in their daily life. This also can make students compare to others' and get some interests. With regards to promoting intrinsic motivation, the lesson was unsuccessful in some aspects because I didn't give interesting activity in step 10 so it might have possibility to lose students' interests about the lesson.
B. Risk-taking
Risk-taking is quite important to students for learning language. When they make mistakes teacher should not give an answer immediately. Teacher try to encourage students to find their answer by themselves to take a risk in the class. So I asked individual questions a lot in step 7,8 and 9. Also I asked them to answer in complete sentences by themselves. I only used repetition and chunking when I taught vocabulary and asked them to summarize. When they have a problem making the sentence correctly, I cued instead of modeling language. In step 7, warm-up, I used T-S-S-T for a question ‘How many hours do you sleep a day’ . Students had some difficulty to make complete sentences but I didn't give answer instead of that I asked other students to help. This was a good way to encourage students to make errors and correct themselves. Taking a risk is necessary when students are learning. Teacher encourages risk taking by cueing. Then more students get chances to speak English, the faster they would reach the success in learning it.
C. Input Hypothesis
According to Krashen’s Input Hypothesis, the students can build up competence by understanding input and the text material should be concerned to be meaningful for students. I think activating schemata is very important to make input comprehensible. Once students are activated what they learned before, it is very helpful and effective for them to understand the new material better. So I gave some questions in step 7 to activate their schemata. Input hypothesis says that students can build competence by understanding messages. So for making comprehensible input to students, I asked students paraphrase with chunking in step 8. Following to Krashen's “I+1.” in his theory such as "I" represents input at the current level of competence, and “+1” means input slightly beyond the learner’s current level. I did some higher activity for Intermediate-low students to make their own list to lead them higher level than current.
III. Conclusion
Through analyzing my lesson plan with some theories from SLA, I found some good things and some problems by myself. So I could evaluate by myself too. When I make another lesson plan next time, I can consider my weak and strong points about lesson plans then fix and evaluate by myself too. I'll consider risk taking and intrinsic motivation more when I teach students to make them to participate class more. Also in the lesson plan, by various kinds of activities, I'll try to make students can stimulate their right hemisphere.
Submitted by Cho Eun Jung
In this lesson, the grade of the students is 1st year of elementary school. Students have been studying English for about 4 hours in a week for the last year. Their levels of reading and listening are novice high and the levels of writing and speaking are novice mid. I’m going to teach the expression, ‘What do you hear?’ and the target verbs related with animal sounds such as roaring, snorting, hissing and so on. The materials are an audio CD, a story book, pictures of animals, flash cards, animal toys and handouts for bingo game.
In the warm-up, I have students listen to the sounds of animals to activate students’ schema and then ask several questions to individual students such as “What do you hear?” and “How do you feel when you hear ‘hiss-hiss’?” In the presentation, I tell a story to the class. Before the story telling, I ask individual students several questions to brainstorm content after reading the title of the story. I tell the story with animal pictures and flash cards written with the target expression and vocabulary items. After telling the story, I check students’ comprehension with questions. I also explain the target vocabulary items with animal sounds. In step 9 and 10, both activities are controlled activities because students are young. The first activity is a role play with the same context in the presentation. The second activity is to play a ‘bingo’ game with the target expression and vocabulary items. Mainly, I’m going to mention the lesson with intrinsic motivation and risk-taking in this writing.
This lesson is consists of activating intrinsic motivation with interesting materials, personalizing and gaps. Firstly, in the material, using a CD recorded animals’ sounds is enough interesting to have students activate their schema. They can get their opinion through listening to the CD. Some of them may guess “It’s a lion!” or “It’s a tiger!” when they listen to the sounds of animals. Others of them may think “It’s horrible!” or “It’s pretty tough!” when they listen to the sounds of animals. Thus, this material brings out students’ intrinsic motivation.
Secondly, the warm-up and the presentation are planed of exciting intrinsic motivation with personalizing. In the warm, I ask several questions to individual students to activate their personal opinion after listening. To illustrate, I ask individual students “How do you feel when you hear “hiss-hiss-hiss”?” or “Let’s think! What animal is it?” with sound of an animal. Students can answer the questions such as “It’s cute,” “I’m scared!” or “It’s a snake.” In the presentation, I have students guess what contents is in the story. For instance, I ask students “Where can you see animals?” or “What animals are in the zoo?” Students can answer the questions such as “I can see animals in my house,” “I can see many animals in the zoo,” or “There is a horse in Seoul Zoo.” Therefore, step 7 and 8 activate students’ intrinsic motivation.
Finally, step 9 and 10 are outlined bring out intrinsic motivation with gaps. In step 9, students do a role play with target vocabulary items. Students have imagination gap and information gap through the role play. When some of them play a role of a lion, the students guess how a lion makes sounds and the students know which verb is used to express the lion’s sound. When others of them play a role of a boa constrictor, the students imagine how a boa constrictor makes sound and they know which verb is used to express the boa constrictor’s sound. In step 10, students play a ‘bingo ‘game with target language. Through this game, students have opinion gap. The class consists of several teams. Each member has each opinion gaps when they talk what is good way to win the game. For example, students can suggest “’Roaring’ is in this blank and ‘Snorting’ is in that blank.” Some students can agree or disagree because they have each opinion. Hence, step 9 and 10 is designed with intrinsic motivation.
This lesson is also planed of activating risk-taking by asking questions to individual students and a role-play activity. First, in the warm-up, I ask individual students “What do you hear?” after listening to the sounds of animals. Students can hesitate to answer because they don’t know the content or they worry about answering in a complete sentence. At the moment, I can cue the student with showing an animal picture or I can model for the students. Additionally, I use T-S-S-T to practice the target expression or classroom language. At the moment, students can worry about the new expression or making the question. When they have difficulty to ask and answer the question, I can model for them or ask the other students to help them. Hence, students take risk through answering individually the question or T-S-S-T.
Second, in step 9, students can take risk when they do a role-play activity. They can hesitate to play a role when they are shy to stand or to speak loudly in front of the class. If they need to help to play their role, I can give some hint to them. For instance, I have the students see the board on which is animal pictures and flash cards with target expression and verbs. They can recognize what they should say matching with their role and the hint on the board. Therefore, students take risk in the role play.
In conclusion, I analyzed this lesson with intrinsic motivation and risk-taking. This lesson is outlined activating intrinsic motivation with interesting material, personalizing and gaps. The lesson also brings out exiting risk-taking with asking individual students, T-S-S-T and a role-play. I think intrinsic motivation and risk-taking are very effective factors to encourage students in their hardest, if, especially, the age of students is young. One of the reasons is because thought of the young students is simple. Thus, they need to practice what they can think deeply. The other reason is because they lack concentration of the class. Therefore, risk-taking is very helpful to control of the concentration of students.
Submitted by Ray
Ⅰ. Overview of the lesson
This lesson was designed for my Methodology microteaching presentation. The title is “Housing” and the student’s proficiency level is intermediate mid or low. This is conversation class in private language institute. Students are totally motivated because of their transfer to the foreign countries in six months or so. They are supposed to learn “used to + inf.” and several vocabulary items related to the topic.
In step 7, I ask student look at the pictures. Next, I ask several questions individually by using TSST. Then I introduce today’s lesson by asking them brainstorming about “Housing”. Here I ask them to TPS.
In step 8, I ask them read focus questions before listening to the text. First, I had them guess the answers in pairs and speak the answers individually with complete sentences. Then they listen to the text again. But, this time they fill in the blanks as they listen. Next, I explain the grammar by personalizing.
In step 9 and 10, I have students do an information gap. I have them make pairs A and B. Each student is given different picture. Next, I ask student describe their dream house in groups.
Ⅱ. Facilitative Anxiety and Intrinsic motivation
In step 7, I ask students several questions individually and use TSST techniques to promote facilitative anxiety. So, students can pay attention and participate in class more. Also, I use materials to draw students’ interest so that I can increase their motivation. Using pictures and graphic organizer activate students’ motivation by connecting them to the topic. I provide them authentic topic because motivation comes from the inside of our minds. We can promote students’ motivation intrinsically as well as extrinsically; here I want to use intrinsic motivation because they are adults.
In step 8, I ask students make complete sentences when answering the questions. Also, I have them guess the answers for focus questions before listening to the text. Next, I ask them fill in the blanks as they listen again and then check the answers individually by asking and answering the questions. This helps them generate more language, making the anxiety facilitative. Also, I personalize different questions so that I make the topic relevant to students to build up intrinsic motivation.
In step 9 and 10, I ask students describe about their dream house in groups. Next, I ask one student from each group talk and write down what they heard. Facilitative anxiety helps student here try to make correct answers. I also provide communicative activities to increase their motivation. I need not promote extrinsic motivation because intrinsic motivation is more motivating than extrinsic motivation.
Ⅲ. Conclusion
When we make lesson plan, we should apply SLA theories to make the lesson successful. To make the lesson more in efficient way, the teacher can use facilitate anxiety and intrinsic motivation. To promote facilitative anxiety, we can use asking questions by using various classroom interaction techniques. It is important and takes times to figure out the proper level of anxiety. If students have too much anxiety, they don’t perform well while if they have too less anxiety, they would be lazy. In addition to the facilitative anxiety, we can promote intrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is related to the student’s own decision or interest and it comes from the inside of the students rather than outside. The teacher should activate student’s intrinsic motivation to generate them more language. Students can handle more anxiety if we give high motivation. Consequently, we can apply facilitate anxiety and intrinsic motivation properly to improve students proficiency when we design our lesson plan.
Submitted by Ellen
1. Overview of the lesson
Now I’m students English my English institute. I like to teach English to many students, especially, elementary school students who are novice mid level. This lesson plan was design for elementary school, 2nd year students with a story book, named, ‘Papa, please get the moon for me.’ Using this story, I taught what things are on the night sky and I explained the various shapes of the moon. Also I explain about adjectives, for example, small, big, and verbs, such as, jump, dance, etc. I used many visuals and realia for help the students understand. In the presentation, for example, I used 4 pieces of large sand paper to describing the night sky and I also used round shaped rice snacks to explain the various shapes of the moon. My students enjoyed the lesson and they participated activities very well.
Theoretical justification of the activities
Right hemisphere participation
Though this lesson, they usually use the right brain with various visuals activities and song. Therefore, they could learn the langue very easily with visualization, positive emotion and imagination.
First, in the lesson plan, I used visuals to help my students learn the language meaningfully. When they listened to the story, they were concentrated on the colorful picture storybook and they could remember the vocabulary items. Even though there were some difficult expressions for their level, they could easily understand with the pictures. For example, ‘The moon got smaller and smaller.’ it was difficult to explain to novice mid students. However, after they look at the pictures and they made the moon with the round rice snacks, which are called bbungtigi in Korea, they could understand this sentence very easily. I think student’s visualization helps the language becomes meaningful and memorable to the students.
Second, they could enjoy the class with various activities. The story book was the package with the CD. In the CD is included the song that is same sentences with the story book. The song is very easy and funny to the students, so they usually sing a song and sometimes they danced. I thought the song made them enjoy the English class. With enjoying the language itself, they could connect their emotion and the languages become to be important to them.
Last, they could imagine with the role play. Some students become fathers, the other students become the moon and the daughter named Monica. In the role play, they should think what they say and imagine about their role. Through these steps they could have the time to think and memorize the language automatically. Also the language would become meaningful and memorable to them.
The Affective Filter, anxiety, and motivation
In this lesson, I considered the student’s affective condition, anxiety and their motivation from their mind. If they have some burden to learn English or too much anxiety, the lesson would be not effective. Therefore I thought that how to make them feel stable and how to activate their intrinsic motivation for effective language learning.
First, I think that the student’s need the suitable anxiety when they learn the language. In SLA I learned the affective filter hypothesis. This hypothesis mentioned that the students who have high anxiety, low self esteem, low confidence don’t acquire the language easily. I agree his idea because when they feel too much tension or high anxiety from the homework or difficult vocabulary items, they couldn’t understand and they couldn’t be concentrate one the class. When I designed the lesson plan, I considered that I would like to the class actively and interestingly. So I used interesting storybook, audio materials and snacks, for example, various pictures, boards, and mini stars and mini moon, etc. Also I didn’t forget about the high risky questions because they need suitable tension and they should have the ability to think creatively. For example, I usually use the TSST technique, so they should make a question and answer about my question or their classmate’s questions. Then, they could be concentrate on the lesson and enjoy it, too.
Second, in the lesson, I think that the students should participate themselves with autonomy not because of their parents or the teacher. I was designed the activity for student’s personalization. For example, I asked students, ‘If you are Monica, what will you ask your papa?, What is your favorite thing?’. These questions, they could personalize and they imagine if they were Monica. And then they could participate actively the lesson. Also they could learn the language easily.
Input and Output
When I taught the story book to my students, I focused on the form and the meaning. In SLA, I learn the language form and the meaning are both important. So I gave them speaking, writing, listening and reading tasks. They should ask and answer the question and they should speak their own ideas. It they have some mistakes, I did error correction. Also I gave the homework to them that they listen to the CD and following the naïve speaker’s pronunciation for their better pronunciation. I usually emphasis the accurate sentences for better out.
Conclusion
When I taught the story book, Papa please get the moon for me, I realized that the importance of using right brain and appropriate anxious and intrinsic motivation and output and input for more effective learning language. Using various materials and realia, the students could concentrate on the lesson and the language becomes meaningful and memorable to them. Also when they spoke their own idea, they could personalize and build up their speaking skill. They use speaking, writing, listening and reading ability in one storybook. It could be effective their language learning.
Submitted by Sandy
Let's start to evaluate my final lesson plan. My final lesson plan's title is 'Things You Learn at the Movies' from 'Timesaver Reading Lessons' and the profile of students are from university students to adults and proficiency levels(speaking, listening, reading, writing) are all intermediate high. The target language is related to imaginations using first and second conditional sentences and the materials are some movie posters, 3 pictures of different famous people in their fields and some specific movie scenes from ‘Titanic’ for writing activity. The text is dealing about some common things in the same movie genres; for example, in the romantic movies, if two people hate each other at the beginning of a film, they’ll definitely have fallen in love by the end or in the action movie, heroes have nine lives and never need a plaster. So, students have lots of interests to do some activities from step 7 to step 10 and this lesson plan can be analyzed in terms of ‘Intrinsic Motivation’, ‘Risk Taking’, and ‘Output Hypothesis’ in SLA theories by examining step6, step 7+8, and step 9+10.
First, according to ‘Intrinsic Motivation’, my final lesson plan can be analyzed by examining step 6, step 7+8, and step 9+10. In step 6, the materials in my final lesson plan motivate Ss a lot by showing some movie posters, or famous persons like Madonna and Martha Stewart, or showing some specific scenes in ‘Titanic’ through movie script and let Ss give their opinions using conditional patterns. In the warm-up, I ask some personalizing questions like “Do you like to go to the cinema?”, “What was the last movie you saw?” and “What are your favorite and least favorite types of films? And why?” and let them relevant to them and express their opinions why they like certain types of films and the reasons. In step 8, I do reading activity with Focus Questions and I include vocabulary teaching in the middle of the presentation, so Ss can personalize and participate more actively with vocabulary lessons. In step 9 + 10, there are some gaps which Ss can do communicative activities. In step 9, I ask Ss to express their ideas using conditional forms, for example, ‘If you were a famous singer like Madonna, you….’, or ‘If you were a famous cook like Martha Stewart, you…..’ with filling the main clause, so Ss can find opinion gaps through discussion activity and they can notice that there are many gaps among them. In step 10, I plan my lesson plan for writing activity, so I show Ss some specific scenes in ‘Titanic’ through movie clip and let them imagine themselves as writers or directors. Through this activity, Ss can imagine many different conclusions from the original movie script and they can acknowledge that there are many gaps(opinion, imagination, and experience gaps) and they want to bridge the gap.
Second, according to ‘Risk Taking’, my lesson plan can be analyzed by examining step 6, 7+8, and 9+10. My final lesson plan’s topic is not risky but Ss must take risks to be successful language learners. In step 6, the materials can motivate Ss by remembering the movie storyline or the persons with whom they go or activating their right hemisphere of the brain. In addition, Ss can express their opinions or have some conflict about their movie preferences to select what to see. In step 7+8, there are many questions from the teacher or Ss, for example, ‘What did you do last weekend?’ or ‘What typically happens in a Hollywood romantic comedy?’. Even though, they are intermediate-high level Ss, they have lots of chances for failures to answer questions so the teacher should identify their failures immediately. In step 9(speaking activity), I don’t have much risk-taking activities because I use some strips which are already written the target content languages. So, it would be better to change the topic to increase risks, for example, they speak about themselves by imagining different results what they have lived so far, so they can’t reuse some expressions from the text. In step 10, I make Ss to post their movie script online board so they have a lot of risks to overcome.
Third, according to ‘Output Hypothesis’, my lesson plan can be analyzed by examining step 7,8,9, and step 10. In step 7,8 and 9, the teacher and Ss are asking and answering questions through T-S-S-T. For example, in step 9, the teacher and Ss are asking and answering questions like ‘If you were a famous director like Steven Spielberg, you….’ and at the end of the controlled activity, one student summarizes what we have done so far and that student would have some problems in summarizing. He would say ‘If I was a famous director like Steven Spielberg, I will cast Nicole Kidman for the leading role’. So, the teacher gives some hints(If I we..we.. r~, I wo~~ d….’ or gives some clear models and he experiments again with the correct ones. We call this ‘reprocessing’ which means one student speaks with some errors and the teacher will give some error correction by giving some hints or give clear model and that student will try again and again. Maybe he or she can do very well in short or simple sentences or he can have some problems in long or complex sentences. On the other hand, in step 10, Ss are in control and give their own opinions without the teacher assistance. So, the interlanguage competences of each student will be developing in this activity.
To sum up, my final lesson was very well reflected SLA’s theories; ‘Intrinsic Motivation’, ‘Risk Taking’, and ‘Output Hypothesis’ in step 6, step 7+8, step 9+10. What I would like to suggest for my lesson plan, it would be much fun for Ss to imagine themselves as if they were in imaginary situations like movie stars and they can personalize themselves without hesitation and they can achieve communicative goals at the end. It would be an interesting topic and Ss can do more actively in the class.
Submitted by Laura
Many may find that an English lesson could help improve their literacy at any age.
The lesson I‘ll analyze with SLA theories is writing material which is about unusual customs in the world. For this class, the teacher need to prepare handouts, picture cards, vocabulary strips for the gist quiz, two decks of word cards for activity. The procedure of the lesson starts with brainstorming about holidays for the warm up. Then, personal questions that the students like the most are followed. In the presentation part, pictures, word strips, graphic organizer are used for the gist question of the writing. For the controlled activity, the students make sentence with words on the cards and lastly, the students do a role play intended to check their understanding of that day's lesson.
This lesson is useful to activate the learner's right hemisphere participation. In the presentation part, the students can activate their right-side brain matching pictures and using graphic organizer which are designed for visual effect. In the step 10, independent activity, role play triggers the right-side of the brain letting the students use their imagination to act a role in the role play.
When it comes to affective filter, this lesson is designed to increase their motivation and tension at proper degree. First, most of the questions are made a bit easy for the level to decrease the student's anxiety. Pictures, word strips and posters are supposed to help the students to get the answers with ease. But, at the same time, the teacher can call make the atmosphere more alert by calling on the student individually,
Input that the students can get from the teacher, I believe, is not very comprehensible. Of course the text is authentic and other assistant materials are also authentic. But if I am asked that how the content which is about other countries customs motivates the students to read, then I would hesitate. However, the output hypothesis is well developed in this lesson. The personal questions in warm-up part, higher level questions about the students' opinions on specific subject in presentation part, and role play activity in step 10, all of these are great examples to check the students' competence, their writing and speaking abilities.
In conclusion, many SLA theories were applied to a simple lesson plan, and we can notice most of the theories are shown every step in a lesson plan. That means we can try and check the theories in our real class and find the best way to teach the student with the best approach. Also, after all, the best way to teach the students the second language is to let them lead their ways with the teacher's minimum and encouragement to move on to the next stage.
Submitted by Marta
As one of my final SLA project topics for an analysis on my final lesson plan of Methodology, I'm supposed to choose Input Hypothesis which emphasizes the importance of comprehensible input in teaching and learning language. In addition to Input Hypothesis, I chose Intrinsic Motivation because I think giving students motivation from the inside is very helpful for making them learn voluntarily which is necessary for effective learning of language.
In relation to Input Hypothesis, the text material should be concerned to be meaningful and appropriate for my students' competence. My students are intermediate low level, high school first graders. They are interested in future career. Because they should choose their course between mechanical and literary. So I think choosing a job that is right for you is the very important. In order to choose the right job, they think about their own interest and aptitude. For the first time I gave the paper which is job survey.
In that paper there are many expressions to know about person’s characteristics.
They can learn new languages while they focus on the contents of the survey paper. It also gives many vocabularies which are helpful for them to understand the contents. The languages it gives generally are not too difficult and not too easy, and also cover all from easy, familiar ones to more difficult, unfamiliar ones, so I can say they are "roughly tuned and i + I input" according to Krashen's Input Hypothesis. For example, most of my students know "practical, insightful, outgoing and persuasive" but most of them don't know "assertive, enthusiastic,
In addition to presenting comprehensible text material, I did something to make my students' input comprehensible for Step 7 and 8 in my final lesson plan and I'll show you some of the examples. First, during the warm-up, I asked them some questions about Job “activate their content schema, for instance, "Do you know what is the most popular jobs in Korea? or "Would you tell us one of the popular career?" And I used some real pictures about Job "Can you see what kinds of careers they are?" to activate their schema, as well. I think activating schemata is very important to make input comprehensible. Once students are activated what they learned before, whether it is genre, content, or form, it is very helpful for them to understand the new material better. Secondly, when I taught them new vocabulary, I used visuals, such as pictures and realia, and gestures to make input comprehensible. When I use visuals, my students understand better because they visuals like pictures and realia, because visuals are more meaningful than text especially for young learners and meaningful input is more comprehensible.
As far as Intrinsic Motivation concerned, students learn better and want to do something voluntarily if they are interested in what they are learning. Firstly, the material, the job survey, is interesting to my students because it is authentic, in other words,
At their age, They should think about their careers. Future career is one of the important issues for them.
During step 9, as another way for intrinsic motivation, I had my students do the role play that prepared for the job interview. As A pair, One will be a employer. The other will be a employee. They can imagine their Partner’s character. I designed the role play including problem solving as a gap activity because students are more motivated and learn more voluntarily when they focus on the meaning and languages can be used for a real communication. . They can imagine their Partner’s character.
Until now, I've looked at my final lesson plan in terms of Input Hypothesis and Intrinsic Motivation. First, I found that I tried to give my students comprehensible input which is i + 1 or roughly tuned. I'm thinking about the problem back to my English learning career since middle school. I often didn't find the right language for certain situation and I think that's because my input was mostly from the textbooks which were not rather comprehensible or meaningful. Next, if the input is more authentic or related to their lives, students can be more motivated from their inside and participate in class more voluntarily. In addition, to make my students motivated, I should design my class as gap activities so the student can focus on meaning
Kim, Young Ae
The title of the lesson is ‘Pulling Over a Car” which is designed for listening microteaching in methodology I class. Students are adults and their proficiency level is speaking, listening, writing for intermediate low, and reading for intermediate mid. This lesson focused on improving students’ English speaking and listening skills so that they can use them in real life. Because they had learned English with a strong focus on knowledge of grammar and vocabulary, they don’t have much opportunity to speak or practice everyday English. In this lesson, students will practice to describe driving a car by using key words and expressions such as pull over, used to and in a hurry. So by the end of the lesson, students should be able to describe the situations of driving a car in a real life.
I’d like to talk about how well integrated SLA theories in the warm up part in this lesson plan. Firstly, in the warm up part, this lesson plan applied Krashen’s input hypothesis by asking many kinds of questions to make comprehensible input such as T-S-S-T, and individual questions. For example, the teacher asked students look at the screen and asked them what they see. After then the teacher asked the same question again so that one student speaks at a time. It is crucial to ask questions individually to make comprehensible input. By asking questions individually, the teacher can check student’s comprehension, also students can recognize how well they follow the lesson.
Secondly, this lesson plan applied intrinsic motivation which is one of the SLA theories. As we learned, intrinsic motivation comes from inside of learners. Also intrinsic motivation has to come from learner’s own decision. Students have desire to perform because it is interesting not because of anticipating rewards. For this reason, intrinsic motivation is more motivating than extrinsic one. For giving some examples from this lesson plan, the teacher asked students to personalize in the warm up. The teacher asked students to share their own experiences by asking questions like ‘Have you been pulled over in a car?” And the student answered to the personalized question, and the teacher asked the same question to another student. Then another student answered, the teacher gave students a modeling. By doing this activity, teacher can activate students’ intrinsic motivation.
Thirdly, this lesson plan applied intrinsic motivation by using information gaps which is one of the SLA theories. There are four different kinds of gaps: information gaps, experience gaps, opinion gaps and imagination gaps. This theory claims that if students know the gaps, students want to bridge the gaps to speech. Through this process, students can be motivated and they can have communicative activity. For giving one example from this lesson plan, students are divided into A and B. Student A will have a picture in the past, and student B will have a picture of now. There must be a few changes and students need to ask questions to each other to find out what the changes are. And the teacher has students to practice by using ‘There used to be …’ form. By doing this information gap activity, students’ intrinsic motivation is motivated enough. So this lesson plan is influenced by intrinsic motivation.
Lastly, I’d like to talk about how Risk Taking influenced in this lesson plan. Reflecting on affective theories of SLA, risk taking is willingness to take chance to gamble to try something new or to make an error. So successfully language learners must take risk. This lesson planed to ask lots of individual questions to give students more chances to take risk. Also this lesson tried to encourage low risk takers by doing comprehension check a lot. The teacher asked questions many times to check their comprehension, and asked students to speak in a complete sentence by saying “Can you say that in a complete sentence, please?” Therefore, this lesson plan shows the influence of risk taking which is one theory of SLA.
To sum up, this lesson is planned to use many kinds of theories of SLA such as Krashens’ input hypothesis, intrinsic motivation and risk taking in different parts of the lesson. Especially, this lesson plan is very successful in terms of using input hypothesis. Reflecting on Krashen, learners can build up competence by comprehending messages. He said learners should understand first, and they add some vocabulary items, grammar rules. Finally they become ready to speak and write. Because of this process, teachers should give lots of caregiver speech, and meaningful messages that are easy for students to understand. For instance, we know one Chinese student who made errors about ‘negation’ such as ‘no way’ and ‘nobody help’ etc. In this case, teacher should keep giving comprehensible input a lot, then the student will understand negation by himself. Therefore teachers should keep in their mind how much comprehensible input is important, and try to apply input hypothesis to their lesson like the teacher did in this lesson plan.
Submitted by April
Part I. Summary of Lesson Plan
Lesson Title: Friends
Profile of Students: 13-15 year old middle school, intermediate high
Target Language: vocabulary related to friendship; giving opinions and expressing gratitude
Materials: animated e-cards related to friendship, Anonymous letter from Lonely and Bamboozled in South Carolina to Dear Abbey column, a song titled “You’ve got a friend”, pictures of friends
Step 7. Warm up
• The teacher uses e-cards from 123greetings.com to activate Ss’ schema.
Ss Look at the e-cards and get an idea what the lesson will be about.
• The teacher asks several questions to individual students, such as “What are the e-cards about?”, “What do you do with your friends?”, “Have you ever had any conflicts with your friends? When and why?”
• The teacher then has one student summarize what they have said about in the warm-up using a TSST technique.
Step 8. Presentation
• The T has the students brainstorm key words and content after looking at the last line of the reading text from Dear Abby column.
Individual students guess, and ask other students the same question.
• The T draws attention to the genre(newspaper) by asking Ss where they would find such writing.
• The T has Ss skim the text for main idea (I need a friend who is a girl.)
• The T checks understanding by asking a student to summarize and by then having them ask another student to do the same. The T cues when necessary and ends with a clear model.
• Next, the teacher draws attention to new vocabulary by having students guess meaning from context. The words include “return”, “annoying”, “nudge”, and “bamboozled”.(Ex: When I call some of my “friends”, they don ‘t return my call.”/ I have a little brother, but he is annoying!/ I feel lonely, but also like a “nudge”/ Lonely and bamboozled) Individual students are called upon and try to identify clues that help them find the meaning. Individual students are called upon to give synonyms and antonyms. Students are also asked to come up with example sentences through think-pair-share.
•The T ends the presentation by asking some higher level questions and trying to personalize. The teacher asks, “Why do you think her “friends” don’t return her calls?”, “What would you do if someone you don’t like calls you? Would you return his/her calls? Why or why not?” “Can you think of anyone who you don’t want to be friends with? If any, can you tell us why?”
Step 9. Activity
• The T has Ss interview with their partner to find out about their best friend.
• In order to find out about their partner’s best friend, Ss must ask their partner questions about their best friend. Before they start interviewing, Ss write interview questions such as “Who is your best friend?”, “How long have you been friends with him/her?”, “What do you do with him/her?”, “Why do you like him/her?”, “Have you ever had any conflicts with them? When and why?”, etc.
• The T tells Ss to ask all the question types starting with ‘who, when, where, what, how, why, how long, etc.’
• After writing the interview question, Ss interview with their partner about their best
friend.
• After the interview, the T now has students summarize(level 3) about their partner’s best friend in groups of 4.
Step 10. Independent Activity
• The T plays the song titled “You’ve got a friend.”
• The T tell Ss to write a heartfelt thank-you note to a friend who has been a best friend with them. The T tell Ss to include any specific moment to illustrate why they felt special friendship with their best friend.
• They will have 10 minutes to write their first draft, when time is finished, they will exchange their writing with their partner to receive and give feedback.
• Then, the T will collect students’ writing to give feedback and/or correct “only” any serious errors.
• After the T’s feedback, students’ writing will be revised later and sent to their best friend or posted on the class homepage, so their best friend or other classmates can read their writing.
Writing prompt I
Who is your best friend? What make you feel special friendship with him/her? Write a heartfelt letter to your best friend to express how you feel with him/her. Include any specific unforgettable moment that you came to feel special with him/her. Also, include any moment with conflicts if you have ever had with your best friend, and express how you feel grateful for your friend being there for you all the time.
Write in the space below or on a separate sheet of paper for 10 minutes. Your first draft will be collected for T’s feedback and then revised to be sent to your friend. If you do not want the T to read your letter, then it will be sent to your friend directly after being revised on your own.
Step 11. Feedback
Step 12. Closure
Part 2. Analysis of Lesson Plan
A lesson plan can be varied what kind of SLA theories the teacher has in mind designing it. SLA teachers can apply different theories to their lesson plan to make it more effective and more appealing to the students. Intrinsic Motivation theory is one way to encourage students to be intrinsically motivated. This lesson plan can by analyzed in terms of the Intrinsic Motivation theory by examining step 6, steps 7 and 8, and steps 9 and 10.
Also, some of the ideas in Krashen’s Input Hypothesis has been spotlighted in contemporary SLA theories even though not all of the Krashen’s ideas are considered as the most effective way to acquire a second language. This lesson plan is designed using the input hypothesis; teacher questions in step 7, reading in step 8, and teacher instructions in step 9 all show the influence of Krashen’s ideas.
While SLA researchers and teachers mostly agree with some of the Krashen’s idea in Input Hypothesis such as caregiver speech, that is, meaningful roughly-tuned input through only the target language, other ideas in his Affective Filter Hypothesis have been opposed by some SLA researchers and teachers. Krashen suggests that low anxiety is important for learners to successfully acquire a second language. However, such idea is very controversial. Unlike Krashen’s idea, the given lesson plan is designed to encourage learners to take more risks to result in a successful language learning; using T-S-S-T questions in step 7, cueing in step 8, and asking different types of questions all show the influence of risk-taking hypothesis.
Furthermore, Krashen’s idea that listening comprehension and reading are primarily important, and that speaking comes naturally after language competence has built through listening comprehension and reading, has been directly opposed by Swain’s Output Hypothesis. Swain agrees that SLA classes should involve more communicative use of language focusing on meaning in order to help learners build up competence. However, Swain asserts that learners build competence through noticing the gap and testing hypothesis in speaking and writing. Steps 9 and 10 in the given lesson plan are designed to help learners to try out and experiment with a new language, notice the gaps, get feedback, and then change their interlanguage system.
1. Input Hypothesis
First of all, the teacher’s questions in step 7 are focused on meaningful communication. Krashen believes that SLA classes should focus on meaningful communication but not on the form. All the questions the teacher asks in the warm-up are meaningful. They are asked for real communication. For example, such a question as “Have you ever had any conflicts with your friends?” provides opportunities for the teacher and the learners to communicate with each other. The teacher does not know if any student in class has had any conflicts with their friends or not. So, such a question is genuine and authentic. In real life, people ask only when they do not know. Furthermore, another question like “What are the e-cards about?” is also intended to communicate with the students in authentic situation. A language classroom itself can make a real-life communicative environment where the teacher and the learners can use the target language in an authentic context. In short, the teacher asks meaningful questions in step 7 to create opportunities for authentic communication.
In addition to the teacher questions in step 7, reading in step 8 also provides the class with authentic communication in terms of roughly-tuned and caregiver speech. Krashen claims that listening comprehension and reading are primarily of importance in language program. According to him, the learners should be given lots of comprehensible input through listening and reading to help improve language competence. Above all, authentic materials such as newspaper article and radio news or songs supply a wide range of input as Krashen refers to roughly-tuned input. Such materials contain different levels of grammatical items. For example, a newspaper article contains easy forms like he or she, medium level of forms such as plural –s as in ‘I love cats.’, and difficult forms like possessive –s and singular-s as in ‘He walks to his grandpa’s every Sunday morning.” The easy forms like ‘he’ or ‘she’ in the article provides an opportunity for recycling and review while they also can be a new language for the novice low level of learners. Furthermore, learners can be exposed to the hardest form such as possessive –s or third person singular –s while reading a newspaper article. While reading an anonymous letter from Lonely and Bamboolzed in South Carolina to Dear Abbey column provides learners with roughly-tuned input.
Another example of Krashen’s Input Hypothesis in step 8 is that the teacher gives a clear model to summarize. Giving a clear model also can be a good way of make input comprehensible. Krashen’s Input Hypothesis states that the teacher should make sure that students understand what is being said or what they are reading. A clear model of giving summary provided by the teacher help learners better understand what they hear and/or read. In Krashen’s idea, teacher talk in SLA class should be like caregiver speech. Characteristics of caregiver speech includes modifying language, slowing down, repeating, restating, changing wh-questions to yes/no questions.
Next, teacher instructions in step 9 can also supply meaningful input to a limited degree. The teacher instructions here are furnished students for an interview activity. The learners will listen to the teacher instructions and will get an idea how to complete their task. So, the teacher instructions in step 9 are also roughly-tuned input for real communication.
2. Risk-taking
One of the example the teacher uses to encourage students to take risks is TSST questions in step 7. To illustrate this, the teacher asks one student summarize using TSST questions. A TSST technique involves much higher risks than a mind-map for two reasons. The first reason is a TSST involves calling on students individually. While a mind-map does not necessarily require calling on students individually, using a TSST technique, the teacher calls on an individual student to answer the teacher’s question and then the student who has answered asks the same question to another individual student. When the teacher uses a TSST technique, students have to pay attention because they never know when T will call on them individually. When an individual student has to speak to the teacher or the class, the chances for the learner to take risks are obvious. Besides, a TSST technique create far more risks than a mind-map because students have to think about grammar when they ask or answer a question while a mind-map does not involve much grammar rather than vocabulary.
Another example that the teacher uses risk-taking theory in the lesson plan is cueing in step 8. Compared to ‘chunking’, cueing creates much more risks. To elaborate this, students have to think about content as well as form when the teacher ‘cues’ rather than gives ‘chunks of words’. In the given lesson plan, having students individually summarize the reading text, the teacher cues when necessary instead of chunking. Cueing involves much more risks than chunking because there are more chances for students to make errors in grammar while they are thinking about content to summarize or answer a question. If the teacher gives chunks to the students, it is less likely that students make grammatical errors or give a wrong idea about the content. They might have some difficulty pronouncing the sentence. Otherwise, no higher risks would get involved when students repeat the chunked words. However, there are more chances for students to have problems pronouncing the sentence when the teacher cues.
In addition to calling on students individually, the teacher also pushes the students to take more risks by asking different types of questions. The teacher starts with a lowest level questions in step 7 such as “what are the e-cards about?”, which does not create high risks because they do not involve much thinking but memorizing. Then, the questions, “What do you do with your friends?” and “Have you ever had any conflicts with your friends?” require students to think about themselves. At the end of step 7, however, the teacher levels up the question types from knowledge and comprehension check questions to synthesis questions by having one student summarize. To answer synthesis questions, students have to combine two or more ideas so as to form a whole, that is a summary. Summary should include the essential points or ideas in a brief, concise restatement. If students do not clearly understand the main idea, they can not give a good summary. Another example of synthesis questions in the lesson plan is found in step 8. The teacher again asks a student to summarize to check understanding after having students skim the text for main idea. Then, the teacher asks questions requiring the highest level of critical thinking including such questions in step 9 as “Who is your best friend? Why do you like him/her?”
3. Intrinsic Motivation
First of all, looking at step 6, materials used in the given lesson plan creates intrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is related to the learners’ own decision or interest. It comes from the inside of the learner rather than outside. According to the student profile in the given lesson plan, students are age 13 to 15 in middle school. Learners in such age group seem to be interested in friends and friendships. Also, an anonymous letter to Dear Abbey column is likely to get students to be involved to experience strong conflicts or advice because it is easy for middle school students to relate the topic to their own life. In short, materials used in the given lesson may draw genuine interests for the students’ age with plenty of advice, opinions and conflicts.
Along with intrinsic motivation of materials in step 6, the teacher also tries to apply the Intrinsic Motivation theory throughout the next steps. The teacher personalizes the topic by asking different types of questions in steps 7 and 8. First of all, he/she asks several open questions in steps 8 to help students relate the topic to their own idea and life experience. For example, to answer the first two questions “Who is your best friend? How long have you been friends with them?”, students relate themselves to the topic. Then, another question like “What do you do with your friends?” requires students to think about their own life. Also, with the question “Have you ever had any conflicts with your friends?”, students need to refer to their own previous life experience. Furthermore, students are encouraged to give their opinions when being asked “Why do you like your friends? Or why do you not like some classmates?”
Furthermore, the teacher tries to draw students’ interest by using communicative activities with gaps in steps 9 and 10. If students know that they have gaps in order to complete the task, they have reasons to communicate with others. In step 9, the teacher encourages students to talk with others by having interview activity. In addition to the interview activity in step 9, the teacher uses an opinion gap in step 10. The students are asked to give their opinions in a journal response. The teacher tries to get students intrinsically motivated to complete their task by telling them that their journal writing will be posted on the class homepage. The question of how Christopher Reeve has inspired the students seems to encourage them to give their own opinion; however, it does not seem that the given question like “Do you believe that Christopher Reeve was a real-life superhero? Why or why not?” would involve strong conflicts for students to give opinions. Who does not think that Christopher Reeve who has overcome such big disabilities is a real-life superhero? In brief, the steps 9 and 10 shows that the given lesson plan was designed to increase students’ intrinsic motivation.
4. Output Hypothesis
One of the example that the given lesson plan is designed using Swain’s Output Hypothesis is the interview activity in step 9. According to Swain, students notice the gap when they speak or write to reach the communicative goal. Even though the interview questions in step 9 are not so difficult for intermediate-high level students to answer with a correct form, students might make errors if their utterances are long and complicated. Some students might make errors not being able to use correct prepositions and/or appropriate conjunctions. For example, to answer the question, “Why do you like your best friend?”, students might have troubles and hesitates, saying “I like my best friend because he cares….”. Otherwise, they might make errors, saying “I like my best friend because he cares of me when I am troubled.”, for they do not know how to use the word ‘care’ correctly. When this happens, learners notice the gap between their own interlanguage system and the correct form in the target language system.
Step 10 in the given lesson plan is essentially to give students plenty of freedom to produce the target language. The teacher is not in control any longer. It is time for students to test their leading edge which is a newly learned form in interlanguage system. Everyone has different leading edge, so we can not imagine one’s leading edge. When students speak or write, they decide what to practice or what to test. When the learners get a new language, they do not know how to use it. So, they need to try out and experiment with it. They practice it to improve competence. Practicing involves reprocessing. To reprocess, learners try it out, get feedback, think again about the language and change their interlanguage system. For example, step 10 in the lesson plan requires students to write a heartfelt thank-you note to a friend who has been a best friend with them. While students write a heartfelt letter to a friend, they will try out a new form they have learned. Then they will get feedback from their peers in 10 minutes. Finally, teacher feedback will be provided for the students to think about what they wrote and change what is wrong in their interlanguage system.
Part 3. Conclusion
To summarize, the given lesson plan is designed using Input Hypothesis, Risk-Taking Theory, Intrinsic Motivation Theory, and Output Hypothesis. First of all, teacher questions in step 7, reading in step 8, and teacher instructions in step 9 all show the influence of Krashen’s Input Hypothesis. Unlike Krashen’s Affective Filter Hypothesis, however, the given lesson plan is designed to encourage learners to take more risks to result in a successful language learning; using T-S-S-T questions in step 7, cueing in step 8, and asking different types of questions all show the influence of risk-taking hypothesis. In addition, the intrinsic motivation theory is used to help students get genuinely motivated by providing different types of personalizing questions in steps 7 and 8, and by providing communicative activities with gaps in steps 9 and 10. With the conflicts in friendship from Dear Abbey column in the newspaper, students in age 13 to 15 can go through deep feeling because they really can relate the topic to their real-life situation. Furthermore, Swain’s Output Hypothesis is used to furnish students with the opportunities to practice a language through the lesson, highlighting step 10.
In general, the teacher applies varied SLA theories in effective ways. The teacher tries to provide students with authentic use of the target language to make input comprehensible. Also, the teacher uses authentic reading (in step 8) and listening materials (in step 10) to help students get roughly-tuned input. Choosing a topic, the teacher considered students’ age to attract their genuine interest in the topic. Students in middle school have lots of things to say about friends and friendship. Moreover, the teacher tries to encourage students to take more risks. For example, the teacher have students use the target language in a sentence level by asking TSST questions and by asking them to summarize. Additionally, the teacher asks higher level questions that require students think critically. Finally, the teacher also realizes that using a language in speaking and writing is very important to build competence. Therefore, the teacher include speaking activity in step 9 and writing activity in step 10. Importantly, the teacher does not forget to give feedback after the independent activity (step 10) so that the students will have chances to fix their problem and change their interlanguage system. Applying different types of SLA theories helps teachers to design their lesson plan effectively.
One suggestion to improve the given lesson plan is that the independent activity in step 10 needs to include more conflicts, advice or opinions. Writing a heartfelt thank-you letter to their best friend might be an interesting topic for middle school students; however, it does not seem to create much conflicts. Writing one or two pieces of advice to any of their friends who has problem keeping friends would help students to get involved with more advice and opinions.
Overview of the lesson
This lesson deals with interpersonal communication, focusing on various conversational styles. After the class has discussed what makes someone a poor conversationalist, the students read an article titled ‘Don’t be a bore’. While they are engaging in the reading activity, they have a chance to develop various reading strategies such as skimming, scanning, recognizing topics, guessing unknown words, etc. Then, students participate in 2 different activities- guided practice and independent activity. First, in guided practice, students have a chance to describe some people’s specific behaviors (they all have poor conversation skills) given a worksheet by using the vocabulary learned from the class and give them a piece of advice. Then, in independent activity, students are asked to write their own article titled ‘‘the secrets of being an interesting person” by using the reading text as a model without the teacher’s assistance.
Theoretical justification of the activities
Right hemisphere participation
In this lesson there are several activities which stimulate student’s right hemisphere functions to make language learning more interesting, meaningful, and memorable. There are 5 categories of activities applied in this lesson- visualization, emotion, creativity, sociability, artistic sensibility, but I am going to introduce only 3 of them - creativity, emotion, and sociability.
First of all, throughout the whole lesson, students are frequently asked to summarize and paraphrase what the teacher have just said or what they have discussed in a group. Also, in step 10 students are required to write their own article titled ‘‘the secrets of being an interesting person” creatively and report the writing to the class after they have done. Those tasks are all related to creativity. As they are engaging in the tasks, their right hemisphere functions will be stimulated.
Second, in step 7 and 8 the topic is personalized and students have a chance to attach language to emotion, and finally language becomes more meaningful and memorable. In step 7 the teacher asks students personalized question such as “Do you like talking with people?”, “Why do you like talking with people?”, “Have you ever felt embarrassed while talking with someone because of their inappropriate behaviors?” etc. Those personalized questions continue to be asked in step 8. Furthermore, in step 9 students write their own advice to the poor conversationalists and finally they write their own creative article in step 10. Through these activities, student’s right hemisphere functions are activated.
Finally, in this lesson students participate in several kind of group and pair work following the teacher’s instructions. In step 7, students discuss in pairs what makes someone a poor conversationalist and in step 8 they share their ideas about some traits that boring conversationalist have in pairs and with class. In step 9, students give a piece of advice to those who are boring conversationalists, and through the whole class, communicative language teaching is effectively used. The topic is authentic and the language which teacher and students speak in this class is authentic. Also, students actively communicate through classroom interaction. All these activities support sociability of right hemisphere. As participating in this class, students get language more meaningful and memorable.
The Affective Filter, anxiety, and motivation
In this lesson facilitative anxiety and intrinsic motivation are applied in several parts of the lesson.
Facilitative anxiety
Facilitative anxiety is a slight nervousness or tension. Swain says it is helpful anxiety for students and different from debilitative anxiety since debilitative anxiety is too much anxiety which makes students perform badly and underachieve. However, facilitative anxiety keeps students more alert, poised and better prepared for class. In this lesson, the teacher promotes facilitative anxiety through calling on students individually, error correction, having student report their own writing to the class, etc.
First, from the beginning to the end of the class, the teacher calls on students individually by name and asks them several types of questions (type1-6) related to the topic such as “Katie, what are we going to do now?”, “Can you tell us why it is good to read on your own words, Anne?”, “Jin, can you tell us how you felt and how you responded to him?”, “Sun, what was the most difficult part for you?”, etc. When students are called on individually and asked to answer a question, they cannot relax entirely. If they know they will be called on randomly in class, they cannot help but more pay attention to the class.
Second, the teacher frequently corrects students’ error in class. In this lesson the teacher usually explicitly points out the error without correction and gives students time to think so that they can correct their error by themselves on condition that they know the answer. However, if it is a bit difficult for the level, the teacher corrects the error and has students repeat what the teacher has just modeled to the students. Here are the examples in the lesson plan; (student) “I felt absolutely uncomfortable and lose interest talk to him.”- (teacher) “You lost interest in talking to them.” / (student) “He always concentrates himself,” - (teacher) “concentrates himself?”- (student) “Oh, concentrates on himself.” If the teacher is willing to correct student’s error, then the students will have a slight tension and concentrate more on the form while answering a question.
Finally, in step 10 students have a chance to report their own writing to the class. To make a presentation in class definitely makes students feel nervous and apprehensive. However, because students know they are going to present their writing after the task, they will probably do their best to write a good article during the time. The students will take this task more seriously. On contrary to this, if there is no anxiety in class, students will be just too comfortable and they won’t be interested in participating in the difficult task.
Intrinsic Motivation
In this lesson the materials are motivating because they contain a strong advice. The title of the reading text is “Don’t be a bore” and the text says people resent and dislike those who bore them. After describing the main characteristics of boring people that research has identified, it concludes that we should work on changing them now if we have some of those traits. Some people can agree with this advice, but some might not. Like in this case, if materials contain opinion, conflict, strong advice, or controversy, the lesson will be more interesting and motivating. Thus, the reading text this class uses encourages students to feel motivated to participate in the class based on their own desire to communicate. That is intrinsic motivation.
In this lesson the topic is personalized in step 7 and 8. The teacher asks students personalized questions throughout the step 7 and 8. Here are some of the questions in the lesson; “Do you enjoy talking with people?”, “Have you ever met someone who made you feel just uncomfortable while having a conversation?”, “Have you ever talked with that sort of person, Sonia?”, “Do you know someone who is self-preoccupied?” etc. Like in this case, if the teacher personalizes topic, the students will have intrinsic motivation because they can connect the topic to their real lives. They can approach the topic easily with more interest and motivation. Thus, there is a good possibility that students are motivated to participate in the class.
The opinion gap in step 9 and 10 makes this lesson motivating. In step 9 the students are asked to give a piece of advice to those who are poor conversationalists. Since each has a different poor conversation skill, the students should give advice to each person appropriately given a worksheet. Here are the sample answers; “Chuck should ask others about their interests.”, “Helen should be more self-confident and not worry about having to impress others.”, “Alexis should stop complaining so much and be more positive.”, “Carlos should keep the conversation flowing more smoothly.”, etc. Every student may have different advice and students are willing to hear those different advices and share their ideas with the class. Likewise, in step 10 the students write their own article titled ‘‘the secrets of being an interesting person”. Their opinions about the characteristics of interesting person may vary from person to person. This opinion gaps and other gaps such as information gap, experience gap, and imagination gap give students clear reason to communicate. When students realize there are some kinds of gaps, they try to bridge the gaps through communication. They have a good reason to communicate. Thus, the opinion gap in this lesson is motivating because students are willing to engage in the activities in step 9 and 10 without any reward or positive feedback.
Input and Output
This lesson includes both input and output to reach a communicative goal. The students build up competence by comprehending input and producing language.
Input
First of all, in step 8 the students get quality input. The students read an authentic article concerning a boring conversationalist and have a chance to look back on themselves. The article (input) is at the students’ current level and slightly beyond the current level of competence, namely, what Krashen calls i+1 because +1 is automatic and always there in authentic language like the one in this article. The reading text has communicative message and the teacher always ask the students real questions related to the topic for communicative use. Also, the text contains full of vocabulary and language rules. It does not focus on only one language point like fine tuning input. Thus, with this authentic material the students get ‘+1 ‘naturally.
Moreover, the teacher asks communicative questions to provide meaningful input throughout the lesson, especially in step 7 and 8. The questions are like this; “Can you tell us why you like talking with people?”, “What do you think makes someone a poor conversationalist?”, “Can you tell us how you felt at that time and how you responded to him?”, “What was the most difficult part of the activity for you?” etc. The teacher does not know students answers or opinions. So, these questions are genuine and meaningful because the questions are used for real communication. Authentic conversations always include comprehensible input so that students can acquire the language naturally.
Lastly, in this lesson the teacher makes input comprehensible and gives students caregiver speech. The teacher frequently rephrases what s/he has just said using smaller chunks or changing the word order, and often provides examples related to the topic with caregiver speech. For one example, in step 7 the teacher makes use of a visual to connect students to the context being presented. The teacher shows students a picture of people at a party with this teacher talk: “Imagine you are invited at this party and you are asked to individually talk with all the people here. Do you think you will always be glad to keep the conversations going?” As students are seeing the picture, they express their feelings and opinions. For them, it is more understandable and memorable because, with this visual, the teacher makes input comprehensible and the students become to easily imagine the party is being given ‘here and now’. It has the same effect as the caregiver speech. When the teacher speaks caregiver speech and makes input comprehensible, +1 is always present in the input automatically. It exists in every meaningful message and caregiver speech.
Output
In this lesson students must produce language to answer teacher’s question. When they produce language to reach a communicative goal, that is, to answer a question, they sometimes hesitate, have a trouble, or fail, and notice they have a problem. It inevitably happens because their interlanguage competences are not fully developed. When the students are engaging in only reading and listening activities, they cannot have a chance to notice their problem. Only when they produce their language, they can discover or notice the gap between their interlanguage competence and the communicative goal. In almost all steps, the students make errors and the teacher corrects their errors. Here are the examples; (student) “we can have a chance to look back ourselves”- (teacher) “Look back on ourselves” - (student) “Ah, look back on ourselves.”/ (student) “We should place the cards to face down the table.” - (teacher) “Place the cards face down on the table,” “Would you try again?” -(student) “Yes. We should place the cards face down on the table” - (teacher) “Everyone, repeat after me. We should place the set of cards face down on the table.” Like these examples, while students are producing language, they have a great chance to discover their problem. In class, the teacher can be the best helper to fill the gap between student’s real competence and the communicative goal on condition that the teacher knows error-analysis. When the students solve their problems either with the help from the teacher or by themselves, they can build up their interlanguage competence. In this lesson, sometimes the teacher cues the answer and sometimes directly tells the students according to the degree of the difficulty for the level. Also, the teacher sometimes writes student’s error and the answer on the board and has the class chorally repeat what the teacher wrote on the board. All these reactions depend on the difficulty of the language. Anyway, through this process, the students find the solution of their problem and finally develop their interlanguage competence.
In step 10, students write their own article titled ‘‘the secrets of being an interesting person”. They should write down their own ideas about what makes a person interesting. Thus, the students control the discourse and have a chance to experiment with the leading edge, namely, hypothesis testing. The reason why this independent practice or hypothesis testing is so valuable is that when students try out new forms, they have a chance to think about the form again and make some changes. That is what Swain calls reprocessing. Leading edge is the forms that a learner is unsure about and still thinking about. These forms are unstable because the learner has not figured out how to use them, exactly. This is the stuff with which the learner has to do hypothesis testing. Only learners can choose their leading edge. So, this independent activity is important. During this activity, the students have a chance to select new forms (leading edge) and reprocess them. As the teacher gives the students chance to test their language in this activity, the teacher will be able to have better understanding of students’ interlanguage competence.
Conclusion
This lesson is based on several important theories of SLA to help students build up their competence effectively, and it is being proved in this report. This report is justifying the lesson’s theoretical foundation connecting the whole lesson to those theories of SLA; 1) Right hemisphere participation, 2) The Affective Filter, anxiety, and motivation, 3) Input and Output. Having carefully analyzed this lesson according to the SLA theories, I conclude that this lesson is well designed and well supported by reliable SLA theories, and I believe it can be used in a real class for this level of students.
Submitted by Joo Young
Overview the lesson
There are 20 students of this class is 3rd grade of middle school students and their proficiency level varies depending on the students however the average proficiency level is speaking, reading intermediate high, listening intermediate mid, writing novice high. The class is designed for the students those who want to learn English more effectively and there are students those who hope to study overseas to advance their English proficiency. Students meet once a week for 2 hours and the course last for 6 months. As most students have been to the English institutes and learned English from native speakers they are quite fluent in English however they are much more accustomed to classes based on the grammars, translating and memorizing the vocabulary words or repeating the drills therefore students are anxious to have some more fun in the class by doing lots of exciting activities and games. Also they hardly have any experience in other cultures except the inner circle cultures and their own culture. Therefore the class is also designed to trigger the students’ interest and fun to the variety of cultural differences as well as improving their English skills.
Theoretical Justification Activity
The “Neurological Framework” explains the relationship between the brain and the Critical Period Hypothesis. It suggests there is a process called “lateralization” which is a process assigning functions to the left and right hemispheres of the brain. The right hemisphere controls functions like the visualization, emotion, sociability, creativity and imagination and so on and those are the functions that helps people to learn the language much more effectively because by using the right hemisphere, language could be learned much more meaningfully and even some functions like sociability tells that the right hemisphere functions meet the reason for using the language itself.
I tried to design my own lesson plan to be more communicative and student centered by doing pair and group activities. Students will be in groups of 5 and each group will have one statement in a tone of a black and white view. Each student will pick 4 kinds of cards in turns and the student who has a “king” he or she will challenge the statement with his or her own idea, and the one with the “queen” will try to disagree with his or her group member and the person with the “jack” will agree with a student in his or her own group. The “7” will make a student summarize their own group members’ idea and the one with an “Ace” will have to paraphrase the groups’ idea. After 15 minutes of discussion, every group will share their own groups’ idea to the whole class and there will be a lot open, deeper discussion. Paraphrasing and summarizing, discussions with lots of open and personalize questions could be great way to make students practice their English and in the same time it will be a good way to use the right hemisphere.
According to Krashen, it is best to lower the student’s anxiety, in other words the affective filter, because this way, students will feel more comfortable and confident to perform English. However Swain disagreed with Krashen and explained anxiety could be regarded differently as the good anxiety, facilitative anxiety, and the bad anxiety, debilitative anxiety. Swain suggested that the facilitative anxiety could stimulate students to hold their learning motivation longer and that would help students to practice and improve English proficiency. According to my lesson plan, I think the main activity itself is triggers the students’ schemata and their motivation because the statements will be quite interesting to think about and playing cards will be fun. Also, every student will be talking without exception and they will have more freedom and feel less anxious and that is because they will be mostly talking in groups.
According to Krashen, students establish competence by comprehending input based on the “i+1 theory.” If the “i” stands for the input at the current level of competence, the “1” means the input slightly beyond the learner’s current level of competence. Therefore Krashen suggest that the best way for students to get input is to obtain input slightly higher than their own competence level and he also suggests the roughly-tuned method as the best-focusing on meaningful messages at the right level so that the learners can understand the language and this would lead to the acquisition automatically. If Krashen believes teachers should mostly concern on the “fluency” but, Swain suggests “accuracy and fluency” should be concerned equally important through his “Output Hypothesis.” Output hypothesis focuses on the “noticing gap” and the “leading edge” which means the lesson should be designed and the teachers should help students to realize what they don’t know and make those unstable, new forms internalized as their competence.
The language and the context should be slightly difficult for students and the whole discussion activity could be a challenge to some students. However, by encouraging the students to speak out and active in the discussion I think the students will have more chance to discover their lack of language. When students share their ideas in the whole class, I think this could be a good time for teachers to give feedback to students and reprocess their “leading edge.”
Conclusion
I really think I had learned many usefully things during the SMU-TESOL and I think the theories which I learned in the SLA course will be really useful to me when I will teach my future students because I will be able to examine the students’ level more specifically and what will be the right thing to teach in the right time. I think there are two important things for teachers to remember and that is patient and creative thinking. Being patient could be difficult for time to time and creative thinking could be a big task for teachers because although there are lots of great referential materials still it would be their job to find and develop their own teaching know-how.
Submitted by Ann
| Activity 2: | Discussion with a deck of cards |
| Summary
of the activity |
Time needed: 45 minutes
As the instruction, student will play cards to act their parts and they will discuss in their groups and share with the whole class about certain ideas of other countries. Students will eventually realize their own way of thinking about the cultural differences. |
| Language
objectives |
-Students will be able to
form an “effect and cause” sentence such as “I agree with the
statement because~” or “I disagree the statement because~.”
-The students will practice forming the present tense sentences. -Students will practice how to paraphrase and summarize other people’s words. |
| Culture
learning
objectives |
-Students will realize that
they have their own point of view in seeing the world.
-Students will be able to see how they think of certain countries and will gradually understand there are no “good” or “bad”, “better” or “worst” cultures, but all humans are equal and the same in the name of God. |
| Materials
needed
(with sample
materials attached below) |
-A deck of cards: 4 Kings, 4 Queens, 4 Jacks, 2 number 7 and 2 Jokers. |
| Step-by-step
Instructions |
|
| Special
notes for teacher |
The teachers should ask students
whether they know the meaning of “paraphrase” or “summarize.”
And the teachers should check the students’ comprehension whether
they understand the whole instruction properly.
The teachers should teach phrases like “no cheating”, “shuffle the cards”, “pick up a card”, “place the cards facing down” etc. |
| Source and references | www.eslcafe.com/idea:
Niki Mantas nmantas@whatcom.ctc.edu Whatcom Community College, Bellingham, WA |
I. Overview of the lesson
The title of the lesson is “James’ cooking diary”. The objective of this lesson is to help students explain their recipe in English using the vocabulary they learned in this lesson. This lesson is planned for a listening class. The age of the students is 15 and they are 1st grade of middle school. Student’s proficiency is Novice-high for speaking, listening, reading and Novice-mid for writing. The number of class will be about 15 students and this lesson is planned to use in a private institute. Students, who are eager to practice English, attend this class and expect to learn many useful expressions. Students who are taking this course have been taking English class for 1 year in a private language institute. Besides this class, they are barely exposed to native English speakers, and don’t have much opportunity to practice English outside the classroom. Students will learn simple present, past tense, regular, and irregular verbs through listening materials, and few activities using materials such as handout, Power-Point, poster and realia.
II. Theoretical justification of the activities
A. Right hemisphere participation
Brain assigns functions, which is called the “lateralization”, to left and right side of the brain. Left hemisphere of the brain controls intellectual, logical, and analytic junctions whereas right hemisphere of the brain mainly controls functions related to emotional and social needs and it is developed for artistic features, music and other needs. In the lesson plan, independent activity is designed to make learner’s right hemisphere to participate though students have to use the language, their left hemisphere.
In the independent activity, instead of writing down the vocabulary words for students to use in their activity, each vocabulary word is written on a colorful squared cut laminated paper with Velcro tape under so the students can stick or take off from a board. There are 30 names of the food they could use to make their own creative recipe. Students are allowed to take out the words and use them for their recipe. This will be a competition and there sure is a time limitation so students will have to be very serious. Throughout this process, students will use their right hemisphere of the brain to be more creative.
B. The Affective Filter, anxiety, and motivation
Comfortable environment will be provided for lower affective filter. A lowered affective filter allows the input to “strike deeper” and be acquired. However, class with no anxiety will let the students not participate and block the input for by calling each student for questions will help students to have a little anxiety.
In the middle of the lesson, students will be more motivate to the lesson when the teacher asks students personal questions related to cooking. For instance, “Have you cooked before?”, “Do you like cooking?”, “What was your favorite recipe?”. Student’s extrinsic motivation will increase when the teacher provide a prize for the group who create most delicious recipe. By putting the activity in a competition form, students themselves will have intrinsic motivation to win the game and satisfied for their achievements.
C. Input and Output
To make input comprehensible, teacher will use materials such as board, power-point, realia and a poster. Also teacher will ask personalized questions to activate students’ schemata for comprehensible input. Students will be listening to a tape and do fill in the blanks for their writing practice. Also students are asked to answer focus questions before and after listening to the tape. The corrects errors that the students makes, such as “I make sandwich yesterday.” to “I made a sandwich yesterday.”
III. Conclusion
Students need proper anxiety with lower affective filter to help them participate in class and which it can bring their intrinsic motivation into a higher level. Also, it is recommended for the teacher to prepare an activity that can actually make the students use their right hemisphere of the brain, so the students can learn the language not by analyzing its form.
This lesson plan is designed for novice-high students who are barely exposed to native speakers. Students practice their language and learn the grammar such as present, past tense, regular, and irregular verbs through controlled and independent activities. Maybe there are students with low risk-taking. For that, it is the teacher’s job to make those shy students participate in class by asking questions, doing some teach backs, or by T-S-S-T. The teacher should make the class comfortable environment for lower affective filter students with strong motivation.
Submitted by Katie
SLA Extra Credit Assignment
Overview of the lesson
The lesson that I will be analyzing is my final microteaching lesson plan. The lesson is designed for adults, at intermediate mid level of proficiency. The tile of the lesson is “Blood Type Personality Traits” and the materials are texts, pictures, and handouts. In step 7, the students brainstorm on the topic of what they first see in a person who they want to date with. In step 8, the students read the text in groups divided into their bloody types and discuss whether the personality traits by the 4 blood types are true for them or not. And at the end of the presentation, the students study the new vocabulary from the text. In step 9, the students match up their blood types with the personality traits in groups and make a chart of the percentages of the personality traits that were true to them by their blood types. In step 10, the students play a game called “Guess Who?” with a pack of laminated picture cards of famous people and the cartoon characters and even their own pictures to practice describing a person with the adjectives that they have learned and the other students will try to guess that person’s or that character’s blood types. In step 11 the students will do feedback with the teacher as a class and in step 12 the teacher ends the class with a closure.
Theoretical justification of the activities
A. Right hemisphere participation
The game in step 10 could be a good example in activating all the functions of the right hemisphere of the brain for the students. Although the students are all adults, who have passed puberty, where lateralization, the process of assigning functions to the left and right hemispheres of the brain, stops, they could learn to start learning the target language in this activity through activating the functions of their right hemispheres.
The laminated cards of pictures will activate the visualization function. For the students to play a game, they need to communicate with each other. This is to activate the social ability function. To describe a person’s or a character’s personality traits also requires the students’ creativity and imaginations, which are the other functions of the right hemisphere. Generally, the students will be either excited or happy about playing a game as an activity in classes. This activates the emotion function of the right hemisphere.
B. Affective Filter, anxiety, and motivation
The warm-up in step 7 could be a good example for Krashen’s affective filter hypothesis. When the students are asked to brainstorm on the topic of their personal criteria on the person who they want to date with, it definitely will interest them and will draw their attention. This is the low affective filter, in which an environment is created where there is low anxiety and thus, will eventually be the best situation for the students to acquire languages.
The anxiety that could arouse in the students through the activities of the guided practice in step 9, where the students are supposed to think about their personality traits and match them with their blood types within the limited time could be an example of facilitative anxiety. Facilitative anxiety is the positive anxiety that creates just the right amount of tension to the students in order for them to get their job done. In this activity, the students are not stressed about doing what they are supposed to do, since it is not a challenging work. However, the time limit is short, and therefore, they need to do it quickly, which an anxiety could be aroused, but a good one. Also, the activity is done in groups and therefore, the competitiveness between the students could be an another source for the facilitative anxiety
C. Input Hypothesis
The text could be an example for Krashen’s input hypothesis. It is not too difficult for the students’ level but just slightly difficult in words, such as conscientious and initiator, is a perfect example for Krashen’s i+1 theory. In his theory, Krashen claims that the condition in which the learner could understand the input through reading or hearing that is a bit beyond the learner’s level of competence is the best condition for the learner’s acquisition. Therefore, the text could be the good example for the input hypothesis.
The other activities, the “Guess Who?” and the matching and the brainstorming are all equally effective in providing comprehensible inputs to the students, which could be the an other example for the input hypothesis.
Conclusion
This lesson plan has quite a number of good examples that originated from the theories in SLA. However, I have to agree that there could be a lot of other suggestions to improve the lesson. For example, I could use more visuals. There is a movie called “A Type-B Boyfriend” that deals with the typical personality traits of a man whose blood type is B. I could have shown a part of the video for the students to pull out more attention and participation in class. I could also perhaps teach “stereotype” to the students and ask them to critique the text for i+1 effect. There could be many more suggestions to improve the lesson. However, I believe that the best way to plan a lesson is probably through the teacher’s enthusiasm and the genuine effort that is being put into.
Submitted by Hanna
Summary of the lesson
Title of lesson: Looking for Accommodations through the Internet
Profile of students: University students and Adults , intermediate low
Target lg: vocabulary related to accommodations, asking their agreement, explaining what two people are talking about.
Materials:
Handouts for focus Questions, cloze activity and the survey. A visual chart about accommodations. A picture of a room.
Warm up
The teacher asks Qs to each student, like “Do you know what accommodations mean?” or “What types of accommodations are there?” to activate their schemata.
The teacher makes Ss to do T.P.S to share their opinions and reasons for considerations.
The teacher shows Ss the visual chart about accommodations.
Presentation
The teacher let Ss read the FQs first and guess the answers to make them get the gist before listening to the tape.
The teacher asks many Qs to ask their ideas such as, “Why do you think Alan doesn’t like it? Do you agree with S1? Do you have anything to add?”
The teacher models for Ss how to express their opinions and make them answer in a complete sentence.
The teacher gives a handout to fill in the blanks while listening
The teacher ask Ss each other (S-S) and correct their mistakes.
Step 9
The teacher makes Ss do a strip story using a picture to practice “there is, there are.”
Each Student is given 4strips which has grammatical errors, right sentence but not matched to the picture, and appropriate one for the picture.
Ss have to figure them by speaking loud in the group, such as “There is 3 pens (Error). There is a vase on the table.(appropriate sentence) and There are 2books.(no matched to the picture)”
The teacher has Ss summarize how to do strip story by pointing to the board and cueing for them.
Step 10
The teacher asks Ss to do a survey by dividing them into groups of 4, such as “4 Ss sitting in the same table will be one group. Who is in your group?”
The teacher gives instruction how to do it in the group, numbering off Ss.
The teacher gives examples of filling in the chart, saying “To fill in the chart with numbers, we have to ask and answer Qs.” “We’ll add up all numbers for each thing.”
The teacher makes Ss summarize the instructions of the survey.
Analyze the lesson
The lesson I had was for listening and speaking activity and designed using Risk taking: asking Qs to each other and guessing the anticipated answers in the presentation and summarizing in the step9 which means it was influenced by Krashen’s ideas.
First, the teacher asks Qs about the “Looking for Accommodations through the Internet” to Ss like “Why do you think Alan doesn’t like it? Do you agree with S1?” These Qs ask them to answer their own opinions do, they can make mistake in expressing their ideas. Also asking Qs each other can be an another example. “S1, do you know what accommodations mean?” From this the teacher can notice their error in speaking, so can correct them. Qs which are making Ss think their own ideas can difficult for them to speak fluently.
Second, guessing the anticipated answers to the focus questions is about Risk taking. Ss are given focus questions before listening to the conversation between Alan and Bob have to guess the answers such as “How do they find the information they need?” Does Alan like what Bob found? S7, what do you think?” So they can focus the text much better listening carefully to find the answers.
Third, summarizing and cueing in the step9 is also an example of risk taking. The teacher asks Ss summarize the instructions to do strip story. If they aren’t sure the way of strip story, they can’t get an appropriate purpose of this activity. So the teacher make them summarize what they are going to do by giving chunking(low risk taking) or cueing(high risk taking). Through summarizing the activity Ss can have a chance to arrange what they heard and concentrate on the teacher.
Conclusion
The proficiency level of this lesson is intermediate-low. I think Ss who are in this level might want to extend their language competence. So the responsibility of the teacher is to help Ss improve their linguistic ability as much as they can. If there is a thing to fix, the teacher should give Ss more chances to speak, then correct and help their weak point by noticing their errors. Also give lower risk taking to have Ss feel free to speak confidently and make them feel learning English is interesting that gives intrinsic motivation to them.
Submitted by Hyun Jeong
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
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
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
I’d like to introduce my class, which was 4 years ago, with 8 students who had entered one of foreign language high schools in Seoul. They were intelligent, enthusiastic about learning itself, and, needless to say, much interested in English. As foreign high school students, they seemed to acquire a great amount of their second language, English. However, because they wanted to learn English grammar intensively, I came to teach them Saturdays and Sundays for 1 and half hours each. While they studied and learned a lot about English, they seemed to feel something unclear in their language. Thus, I was asked to teach them especially a bit high-leveled English grammar intensively. One day, I taught the subjunctive deductively like Korean typical lesson; teacher oriented with students taking notes, sitting through the class time, and passively answering questions. For the students to follow the lesson easily, I got them to preview before class as usual. While explaining the rules of the subjunctive, I tried to make an authentic example for each rule in order for them to receive and acquire comprehensible input and for the input to last long (even though that time I didn’t know the concept of making input comprehensible).
Ⅱ. Theoretical justification of the activities
Right hemisphere participation
Since they all were high school students, it is obvious that they passed the critical period of puberty, which means, according to the cognitive theory, the right hemisphere didn’t take main part in language learning any more because the right hemisphere tends to harden around puberty. Therefore, they studied language by analyzing or categorizing, which is the way the left hemisphere of the brain works in, rather than standing ambiguity, or acquiring the language by emotions specialized in the right hemisphere like the way they learned the first language when they were little. I guess that due to this natural phenomenon, they couldn’t ignore the ambiguity of their second language, so they wanted to learn or fill it through analyzing or learning directly.
The affective filter, anxiety, and motivation
I think that the majority of them had moderate affective filter, which means low anxiety and fairly high intrinsic motivation. The rationale for the opinion is that my class was not much relevant to attaining high scores or any extrinsic prizes and they were apparently interested in improving their English capabilities. In addition, they seemed to enjoy taking my classes and making their own sentences in spite of a few opportunities, and enthusiastically asked questions which were not related to the day’s context showing their interest in the language. Likewise, the more they learned or acquired the more motivated and the more pleased they looked. However, one student who was the best in almost all subjects showed very high anxiety about his test scores at school and also English acquisition. Unlike Krashen’s hypothesis, he continued the position of the top at school and improved his language faster than any other student in the class by studying harder and harder.
Input and Output
I conveyed the knowledge or rules of the subjunctive mostly in the deductive way. Even though giving the chances to make their own sentences correctly and some authentic examples to them played comprehensible input, my lesson was not really making input comprehensible because the input of the lesson was focused on the rules of the subjunctive. That the students were given time to create and speak their own sentences according to the learned language probably played a good role in the hypothesis testing. However, there is no doubt that it was not enough for the students to practice the new language and find out and fix problems in their language. For comprehensible input and the hypothesis testing and noticing gaps in the output hypothesis, I should’ve asked the students to speak more and given more opportunities to make errors in the use of their language.
Ⅲ. Conclusion
The lesson I introduced was conducted 4 years ago when I didn’t realize there exist a number of factors and methods to improve or hinder second language learning. Although I can’t deny there is no perfect method for everybody, I now believe the typical Korean teaching style like I did in the class must be changed. It couldn’t make a big change overnight because teachers, parents, as well as students need time to get accustomed to it. For example, when one of my friends, an English teacher in a private institute too, tried to use part of the methodology she’s learned recently, asking the students ‘Now, guess what the meanings of these words would be with your partner.’ the students didn’t do pair work. Instead, they stared at the teacher, my friend, with the face perplexed. They had never done pair work, group work, brainstorming, etc. at least in private institutes, so they didn’t know exactly what they should do. The instruction was very simple though. Likewise, we should be careful of making and performing our lesson plans and should apply a lot of aspects such as time, multiple intelligence, input, output, anxiety, methods, etc. to class prudently.
Submitted by Jin
Ⅰ. Overview of the lesson
The title of the lesson plan is Business Letter of Apology. I used this lesson plan when I presented a writing microteaching in methodology class. Profile of students is adults and intermediate-mid. Target language is vocabulary related to giving apology and business letter form. The materials are jumbled letter, voucher samples, handout for reading text and focus questions, DVD (Shallow Hal) and DVD player, overhead projector, and a sample letter for writing apology. The reading text is a business letter of apology from a hotel manager in reply to one customer’s complaint. In warm-up, the teacher activates students’ schemata by asking students think of the situation of apology. After that, the teacher asks students to make an apology to a customer with a specific situation. In presentation, the teacher teaches the business letter form with jumbled letter activity and checks understanding by asking questions in handout. Next the teacher asks students to make questions for given answers in handout then finish up with teaching vocabulary. In step 10, the teacher asks students to write an apology letter to a character in the movie, Shallow Hal for the accident in the movie clip.
Ⅱ. Theoretical justification of the lesson
A. Intrinsic Motivation
Material especially the reading text is not motivating enough it doesn’t contain much of opinion and conflict or controversy even though students are adults and may have interest in business letter from. But the topic is personalized in step 7. Asking students to think of situation in giving an apology is motivating. In step 8, the topic is not personalized at all. It only focuses on main idea of the reading text and teaching vocabulary related to making an apology and business letter form. Personalized questions in step 8 would make the topic more interesting. Before teaching vocabulary, the teacher could ask students what they would do if they were in the position of the hotel manager in the reading text. Imagination gap and opinion gap in step 10 make the lesson motivating. Students have to write one sentence each and asked to be creative in writing. They can imagine the situation in the movie clip freely. They can have different opinion in the letter of apology to the customer.
B. Risk-Taking
Calling on individual students in step 7 and 8, high-level questions in step 8 and reading aloud after writing each sentence in step 10 encourage risk-taking. Especially in steps 7, there are many T-S-S-T rather than mind map. This makes students make questions and involves grammar. In step 8, the teacher asks high-level questions like why they put one piece after the other in jumbled letter activity. It is an analysis question. Students have to look for cohesive devices in the letter to put the pieces in the right order. The teacher used chunking for the answers of high-level questions. However cueing could encourage more risk-taking because students have to complete the sentence not repeating teacher’s modeling. In step 10, the teacher asks students to read their sentence aloud to a group member after writing their part. To make the lesson more risk-taking, the teacher could ask students to read the completed letter to the whole class.
C. Input Hypothesis
Students get roughly-tuned input as they read an authentic business letter in step 8 and the teacher asks communicative questions to practice meaningful input in step 7., i+1 is automatically included in authentic material as long as input is comprehensible. The teacher makes the reading text comprehensible in step 8 in various ways. With focus questions on main ideas and several specific fact finding questions, the teacher make it communicative class. Questions like “Have you ever apologized before?” and “What would you make an apology if you are the restaurant manager” in step 7 are meaningful and genuine questions. Those questions are designed for communicative purpose. Although the reading text is authentic, the lesson would make roughly -tuned input more comprehensible with open questions and personalized questions in step 9. They could be “What students would offer to the customer if they were in the position of the hotel manager” or “Have you ever received a voucher from a hotel or a restaurant when you made a complaint?”
Ⅲ. Conclusion
I was surprised to see that my lesson plan does contain many aspects of theories in SLA class and it was unintended. I didn’t think of applying those concepts in writing the lesson plan. How what I learned in the methodology class is connected to the theories in SLA is quite amazing to me. I could have made the lesson plan more perfect if I thought of applying concepts in SLA before. I am satisfied with warm-up because topic is personalized, it encourages risk-taking and roughly-tuned input is given. But in step 8, the teacher has too much to do in given time frame. Therefore the topic is not personalized enough and it contains finely-tuned input even though the reading text is authentic. In step 10, opinion gap and imagination gap make the lesson motivating and the activity involves some risk-taking. Overall the lesson is well prepared with various concepts like intrinsic motivation, risk-taking and roughly-tuned input applied except some minor deficiency in step 8.
Submitted by Anna
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.
Submitted by Sun
Part 1. Summary of lesson pan
Lesson title : Sunday Morning Routines
Level: 10-12 year old elementary students , novice mid
Target language : vocabulary related to routines
Material : pictures
Warm-up
-Make sure that students know what day “Sunday” is. If they don’t know, draw a -little calendar on the chalkboard and quickly show them what day “Sunday” is.
-Ask students: What time do you wake up on Sunday mornings?
Get into a small group and ask each other
Presentation
- Uncover the chalkboard if covered. Refer to the pictures and tell the students to listen carefully. Tell the story once through. such as:
-Go through the story one frame at a time and have the students practice by repeating
the sentences
- Ask the following questions and let students take turns answering them. If they get
stuck, prompt them with key words from the story.
- More questions: Put the following question words on the board and have students create their own questions about the story. Ask a partner.
Step 9 .Telling the Story
Have students take turns telling the story on the board. Let the stronger students go first. Do not correct all mistakes but give clues and encouragement. If the class is large, do it in pairs.
Step 10.
- Let the students draw the sequence of their own Sunday morning activities. Ask them to share with a partner.
Part 2. Analysis
This lesson plan is affected by input hypothesis , risk-taking theory and Intrinsic motivation theory because the teacher tires to give input by care giver speech, encourage students to take risks by having them draw their own routine and motivate students by eliciting their own ideas.
First, In step from 7 through 8 , this lesson is based on using pictures. Visualization such as using pictures might be one of the most effective input to attract students interests. In this lesson, teachers give input mostly by pictures in step 7 to 10 and in step 8 teacher tells the story twice with care giver speech referring to the pictures.
Second, the teacher has students take a risk by asking them to create their own questions about the story in step 8. Most of students have a hard time asking questions and they might take a risk to create their own questions and ask a partner. In this situation, the teacher should give the certain instruction for making a question about the routine. The best way is to give detailed examples or give a clue to help students to take a risk. Of course the teacher can put the following question words on the board What…?Where…? When…? Who…? Also in step 9, the teacher asks students to take turn telling the story on the board. For the students who have low level proficiency might be hard work to make a story. So, if it is possible the teacher can have students write the story before they present their story.
Lastly, in step 8, the teacher has students ask questions such as “what time did I wake up?” , “What time do you wake up?” , “What is the first thing you do in the morning?”
and let students take turns answering them. In his process, student will provide their opinions and their own ideas and finally they will motivated to know each other’s information which leads to draw their intrinsic motivation. Also, the teacher tries to give intrinsic motivation in step 10. The teacher has the students draw the sequence of their own Sunday morning activities and ask them to share with a partner.
Part 3. Conclusion
This lesson is the good lesson because the teacher gives students comprehensible input that includes new language using pictures effectively. The teacher goes through one frame at a time and he produced the story clearly and communicatively considering the proficiency of the students. Also, this lesson encourages students to take risks. If students don’t take a risk, they can’t learn new language because they don’t experience it. The job as a teacher, we have to make students try and experience it even though it is a hard task for them. For the last, the teacher succeeds in drawing intrinsic motivation by making the lesson be relevant to the students. As a result, this is strong points for students to be motivated effectively and the weakness is that asking questions for the novice students are the most difficult tasks so it should be well prepared to do the activity.
Submitted by Sue
The main topic of my final lesson plan is about an advertisement of a house for sale. The student’s language proficiency is intermediate mid, and all of them are adults who are eager to improve their English because they are planning to immigrant USA or study aboard. The materials are an advertisement on web site about a house for sale, two handouts about word comprehension, and writing activity. They will learn the target languages that relate to an advertisement of a house for sale. In the content, grammar can show by the simple tense verb. Words are related to the house and house advertisement such as 1/2 bathroom, patio, amenities, Jacuzzi, area pool, sale pending, and single family detached. In addition, language functions are describing the house and persuading for house sale. In the tasks, writing task writes the letter to their parents why they chose it and speaking task is role-play. About objectives by the end of the lesson, students should be able to identify the form of advertisement, classify the terms of meaning of the house sale and practices the new vocabulary by doing a role-play. Additionally, they can describe a house that they want to buy and tell the reasons why they chose it and persuade a person to buy a house by telling good things about it.
To be specific, in warm-up, firstly, I tried many questions because they can activate their schemata by using a picture and various classroom interactions with questions.. Secondly, in presentation, I get to prepare students finding the genre and main idea with skimming and scanning, and doing matching words activity. Thirdly, each controlled and independent activities, they will do a role-play for giving some roles and characteristics. Students will have chances to practice language they do not use very appropriate even though they learn it in controlled and independent activities.
In theoretical justification of the activities, firstly, as right hemisphere of participation, I will use three activities to develop such as visualization, sociability, creativity, imagination and emotion in right hemisphere. According to showing a visual like advertisements, they can try to remember something in warm-up. In addition, they try to write the letter to their parents about advising buying the house because students imagine their parents’ situation such as immigrants. Like this activity, even thought my students are adults, they can use their imagination to learn second language. Moreover, in role-play, students can imagine and create characters and situation to communicate with each other, they can practice using language, and then use their right hemisphere.
Secondly, in the affective filter, anxiety, and motivation, I will give students some closed-referential and open-referential questions which can activate their schemata like “have you ever seen an advertisement of a house for sale?", "could you remember the advertisement of a house for sale in what there are?" in warm-up step. Before the presentation step, students can have low affective filter through these questions and can be small anxiety for the lesson. Hence, it can be helpful for students to have low affective filter as well they can have the answer more easily and comfortably with those questions. Besides, those questions are sufficient to have a high motivation because they can be interested in the topic of the lesson by asking and answering the questions, as they would expect. Thirdly, in the input and output for make input comprehensible, I will train my students rephrase with chunking, after exploring the main idea of reading text because it is very essential and helpful for understanding the reading text. Along with, I will preview the lesson with some closed-referential and open-referential questions that can activate students' schemata; students can guess the lesson and prepare for their lesson at ease. In addition, I will describe and explain the detail of buying house, so students can widen their knowledge.
I tried such as repeat, rephrase, preview, describe can help students reach I+1 more naturally and comfortably. These things can not only accomplish to language communicative competence, but also comprehend new language meaningfully. I used to apply the teaching of grammar rule directly like finely tuned input, so most of students who were in grammar teaching setting cannot speak correctly, just focus on memorizing, not meaningful. As a teacher, I will build an attempt to help students make input comprehensible. For output to students, I will ask many questions, even though students cannot know what they have errors. Above all, doing a role-play, students are able to achieve the communicative goal, in speaking activity, they will practice their language related to giving some describing and persuading. In addition, in writing activity, students can get a opportunity to practice their language expressions and new vocabulary. All of things considered, the most significant object is to achieve the goal of communication competence, so I will apply various technique, make comprehensible input, and get all set to the lesson naturally.
Therefore, my students are adults; they have already passed the puberty. I guess that they could feel not easy in learning a second language more than children learn. As a teacher, I will try to train many tasks, like that; I will provide them to apply their right hemisphere because adults feel trouble-free to use their left hemisphere. So, it is not good exercise for learners to a second language. Next, to ask question about activating their schemata, they can have a low affective filter, particularly adults can be troubled what they will make errors. Moreover, they can throw away their anxiety by doing activities; teacher's job is to get prepared for the lesson more comfortably. The last, I think that input and output are very significant for learners, and then they cannot separate. If a teacher want to make input comprehensible lots, they would speak to complete competence, apply various input comprehensible, make some activities which can practice their target language, and know what they have difficulties. Therefore, all of my students can advance to their communicative goal if they have many opportunities.
Submitted by Kyungim
Summary of lesson plan
The title of the lesson is “Have I found Ms. Right?”. This is for adult at the proficiency level of intermediate-mid. In the warm-up, the teacher tells a story about Christmas Eve with background music to activate students’ schema. The teacher asks them such as “What is his/her personality like?”. The teacher show PPT of a variety of pictures of faces and says words which describe personalities and appearances like ‘compatible, generous and considerable, etc.’ The teacher wants the students to do TPS by giving them a question “What’s your ideal type?”. While communicating in a whole class, the teacher model and ask students to repeat.
In the presentation, the teacher provides students with an article ‘Dear Agnes column’. The students skim the text for main idea and do TPS for filling in the graphic organizer. The students scan it for specific information and do ‘true or false’ with their partner.
In Step 9, the teacher has students do an information gap activity. Students are given handouts with different blanks. They should ask their partner questions such as “When will the engagement party be held?”. After information gap activity, the students share their answers with partner and one of them read his/her invitation information.
In step 10, the teacher has students write a reply accepting or declining the invitation. Before writing, they do TPS for FATP of the writing. While sharing ideas in a class, the teacher can ask such as “What’s the purpose of your writing?”. After writing a reply, the students exchange their letters with their group members. The teacher asks someone to summarize his/her group member’s decision and reason.
Analysis of how well the lesson integrates into SLA theories
This lesson was influenced by Input Hypothesis. The teacher asks several questions to individual students to activate students’ schema in the warm-up. The teacher asks students “What’s your ideal type?”. According to Krashen, this question is meaningful message for them. It’s called roughly-tuned input. Furthermore the teacher uses the effective music and pictures to make his/her talk comprehensible. The students can draw on their interest to answer to the question like “What’s your ideal type?”. The teacher constantly involves students, ask many questions, and encourage students to express their ideas and thoughts in the new language through TPS. In the presentation, the teacher provides students with an article ‘Dear Agnes column’ for skimming and scanning. The primary method of getting comprehensible input is through reading according to Krashen. In step 9, the students interact meaningfully through information gap activitiy. They ask and answer each other to fill in the blanks. Peers can provide each other with comprehensible input. Input from group mates may be more comprehensible and communicative. Furthermore, peer input may be of a particularly high interest level.
This lesson involved Intrinsic motivation. This reading material is interesting, appropriate for intermediate-low adults. After the students read this ‘Dear Agnes column’, they can give strong advice, opinion or suggestion to the writer. Good authentic material can motivate the students to read or speak. When the teacher shows the students why it’s personally relevant to them, in other words, when the students personalize the topic, the students are very motivated. The teacher asks students “Can you tell us about your ideal type?”, and they think of that in step 7. In step 9, the students do an information gap activity. Good communicative activities have gaps. The students have to find the gaps in communicative activities. The students talk each other to get missing information. This is an intrinsic motivation for communication. In step 10, they write a reply accepting or declining. This is an opinion gap. If you want to know the partner’s opinion, they want to talk to each other.
This lesson shows that it’s designed using risk-taking. Calling on student individually and asking him/her question like “ , can you tell about your imagined ideal type?” in warm-up is risk-taking. The teacher asks someone to summarize his/her group member’s decision and reason in step 10. Summarizing is high risk-taking job. The speaker has to consider time limit, right grammar and pronunciation. The student has a lot of chance of failure.
In terms of Output Hypothesis, this lesson shows noticing the gap and hypothesis testing. In the step 8, when the teacher asks students “What is the first rule to choose a perfect marriage partner?”, the students have to answer like “Marry someone who has qualities you admire.” , “Marry someone who is polite and kind to others.”. However the students can make errors like “Marry someone has qualities you admire.” , “Marry someone who polite and kind to others.” The students may discover problem and try to solve that problem through the teacher’s modeling, chunking, or correcting errors directly.
Conclusion-Talk about how successful the lesson was, would you revise it based on the theories?
This was my team’s methodology microteaching lesson plan. It was interesting and successful. The students were motivated and could practice four language skills in the lesson. However there are a few things to revise based on the theories. In the presentation, the activity is not interesting. The students just scan and skim the text, summarize and ‘true or false’ activity. They may use the language memorized from the text. It would be better that the teacher asks students some personal questions individually to increase students’ motivation. For example, “Among these rules, which one do you think is the most important to you in choosing a perfect marriage partner?”. In step 9, the students do information gap activity. They have different information and blanks, so they have to exchange the missing information. This is for just study. If the students read movie star’s real invitation, it would be fun. And they can write their own wedding invitation. This is likely to be more authentic and creative writing. After this writing, the students can get their partner’s wedding information through questions and answers. While doing this, they have to use the new language. This activity involves risk-taking. In step 10, the invitation is not authentic. The students are not willing to write a letter to unfamiliar people. They are not quite interested in their engagement party. It would be better that the hosts are celebrity. If Tom Cruise invites you to his engagement party, you are very excited about replying to him. It is related to intrinsic motivation.
Submitted by Emily
Overview of the lesson.
My final lesson plan topic is “Being single or being married, which is better?” The students profile is the intermediate-low for adults and the materials are two handouts, pictures, and use on the white board. Being marriage is the hot issues among the younger generation and so I choose this topic. In the warm-up, I presented two pictures and draw the mind –map to help students understanding the topic. In the presentation, the lesson is focused on understanding the text by skimming, scanning to find genre, main idea and specific idea about advantages and disadvantages of being married in the text. In the step 9 and step 10 are activities. One is to give some advice about marriage life for their friends; the other is to write a love letter to their fiancé. After finishing the writing, the teacher and students evaluate about the lesson.
Theoretical justification of the activities.
Right hemisphere participation
I used two activities to help students the lesson, such as visualization, sociability, and imagination in the right hemisphere participation. I think that the visualization is good way to help students guessing their imagination or creativity because students can make language to remember easier and two pictures are presented as a meaningful tool. I used imagination in warm-up and writing activity. This is helpful to guess some vocabulary items and students imagine that they have some problems with their fiancé when they write the love letter.
B) The Affective Filter, anxiety, and motivation.
These factors are very important to learn the second language because these are used to check students’ achievement when they learning the second language. If students have high affective filter, students become more difficult to pick up new language. When I ask some questions to students about being single and married, I didn’t think they have much high affective filter and anxiety, because the topic is a common thing in our life even though it is a important thing. The lesson was processed through comprehension check, classroom interactions, and pair work. Students could concentrate on the lesson, but I don’t think that I gave students a high motivation in writing because students were not interested in writing a love letter because they usually send an e-mail when they connecting each other. That is why some students didn’t concentrate on the activity. I should have considered this when deciding the activity.
Input and output
Input hypothesis said that students build competence by understanding messages when teacher provides comprehensible input. So in my lesson, I tried to understand for students to make a comprehensible input and output what they learned knowledge by using rephrase, summary and paraphrase, and T-S-S-T classroom interaction after reading the text or giving the directions. I think that these methods are helpful for students understanding during the lesson. However, I am not sure whether I gave students I+1 or not. I leaned I+1 is necessary for students when teaching. I know that I should do in my lesson, but I didn’t give enough input I+1. Next class, I should consider this for students and plan the lesson.
3. Conclusion
Through my lesson plan, I realized that there are some problems to understand for students and I should consider these essential factors. When learning the second language, I try to prepare the lesson plan in more detail. I learned many theories of Second Acquisition Language class and they are useful for the lesson, but I like to emphasize on I+1and students can have a low affective filter, low anxiety, and high motivation to learn while studying the second language. It is useful for students to convey and understand knowledge more easily and more meaningfully. Moreover this is the teacher’s job.
Kim, kyoung-ae
I. Overview of My Lesson
The profile of my students is as the followings. The students are university freshmen, and their proficiency level is different in four skills: intermediate-mid for both speaking and listening skills, intermediate-high for the reading skill, and novice-high for the writing skill. The type of class is English for academic purposes, and the students take this course because it is the requirement.
Regarding to the lesson, its title is package tour. The main task is listening to the conversation between a customer and a travel agent. As for the activities, the students do two things. One is to create their package tour advertisements. Before letting the students do this activity, I show a poster of a package tour advertisement and teach some vocabulary words showing visuals. After finishing their advertisements, the students choose the best one in an each group. In addition to this activity, the students do another activity, which is the discussion. During the second activity, students compare two package tours that I show and select one in an each group. After the end of this lesson, the students should be able to use comparatives while comparing two package tours given five expressions without the teacher’s assistance..
II. Theoretical Justification of the Activities
Right Hemisphere Participation
As the Neurological framework states, the right hemisphere of the brain is very meaningful for L2 acquisition. Nevertheless, adults tend to overuse the left hemisphere in the L2 acquisition process. Using the left hemisphere, adults analyze L2 as they study math or science. However, language cannot be easily acquired through analysis or reasoning. Thus two activities of my lesson are designed for the right hemisphere participation.
The first activity – creating a package tour advertisement – activates two functions of the right hemisphere: visualization and creativity. As for the visualization, I ask the students to imagine that they are travel agents and that they want to put their package tour advertisements in the Korea Herald. In addition, I make a poster and show it as for an example of a package tour advertisement. This activity also makes the students use their right hemisphere by creating their own advertisements. An individual student should design his/her own package tour and make an advertisement for it. This activity enables the students to use the right hemisphere of the brain, which in result makes acquiring L2 more memorable and meaningful. Hence, my students can learn L2 more easily.
Furthermore, the second activity – discussion – helps the students to utilize sociability, which is also one of the right hemisphere functions. In a group the students discuss which one is better for each group by comparing two provided package tour advertisements. This activity is significant because interaction with people is an original purpose of language acquisition. Thus my students can use the right side brain function and then acquire L2 comfortably.
The Affective Filter, Anxiety, and Motivation
The Affective Filter
According to Krashen and Terrel, the affective filter operates in the learner’s mind and is one of key factors to influence the learners’ success in the L2 acquisition. There are two filters: the high affective filter and the low affective filter. The high affective filter such as anxiety, low confidence, low self-esteem and negative attitude hinders the learners to acquire L2 successfully as it blocks input. On the other hand, the low affective filter such as positive attitude, encouragement is very helpful. This is because the low affective filter makes input smoothly penetrate into the learner’s mind and become competence.
In order to get my students’ affective filter low, I keep giving positive feedback to the students during the activities and encourage them to use L2. For instance, when the students answer my questions right, I say “excellent,” “good job,” and “wonderful” to the students. Even though some of my students make mistakes, I smile and give them the second chance to correct their mistakes. I think my method allows the students to have positive attitudes to themselves and L2 acquisition. I also believe this helps the students have less difficulty in acquiring L2.
Anxiety
There are two types of anxiety in the L2 process: debilitative anxiety and facilitative anxiety. Debilitative anxiety is too much anxiety so that it makes the students learn L2 with great difficulties. However, facilitative anxiety is very helpful for the learners because it makes the learners nervous enough to accomplish their goals in the L2 acquisition process. With facilitative anxiety, the students can be more alert, pay more attention to the lesson, and accept more input.
In order to promote my students’ facilitative anxiety, I do T-S-S-T and give error-corrections when I give instructions and check the students’ comprehension during the activity session. In addition, I call on the students individually and ask them their group’s choice for the above two activities. Moreover, the students should create their own advertisement, which is their goal to be accomplished for the first activity. I think this activity makes the students not ease their minds to use L2 and makes them try harder to have further knowledge of L2. Thus, I think my activity and teaching method help the students have facilitative anxiety so that they achieve L2 acqusition.
Motivation
There are two motivations in SLA: intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is from the inside of a person. It is the learner’s internal stimulation to acquire L2. This motivation allows the learner to feel good and confident when they accomplish L2 acquisition. In contrast, extrinsic motivation is getting rewards from people when they are good at learning L2.
Since these two motivations are significant for the L2 learners, I stimulate both through the activities. Extrinsic motivation works out in the first activity because the students want their advertisement to be selected as the best one for their group. Getting good grades for this lesson also stimulates the students’ extrinsic motivation. As for intrinsic motivation, I let the students discuss provided two package tours. During the discussion, the students should use given five comparatives that they have learned in the lesson. Through doing this, the students can feel confident and good about that they are able to use comparatives. Thus these two activities are important and useful for the students’ motivation.
C. Input and Output
Input
According to Krashen’s Input Hypothesis, the students can build up competence by understanding input. Then he mentions “I+1.” "I" represents input at the current level of competence, and “+1” means input slightly beyond the learner’s current level. Care-giver speech is mixed with "I+1”. Thus the teacher should provide care-giver speech and do not need to worry about “+1.” In addition, the teacher should provide rough-tuning input, not fine-tuning input. This is because the students acquire L2 in the natural order.
For this matter, I do three things during the activity session. First, I make input comprehensible when I give instructions for the two activities. In order to make sure that I make input comprehensible, I check the students’ comprehension by asking questions to the students. Secondly, I give my students care-giver speech. When I doing it, I care about whether my speech has meaningful messages and it is the right level of my students. Thirdly, I do not worry about “+1” because I think my students can jump into the “+1” step if they are ready for it.
Output
In contrast to Krashen’s Input Hypothesis, Swain’s Output Hypothesis maintains that the learners focus on grammar rules and meaning only when speaking and writing. Swain also argues that speaking and writing skills involve communicative use and then build up competence. Adopting this theory, I help my students produce L2 through writing and speaking in the two activities. As mentioned in the above, the first activity is to create the travel advertisement so that the students should do writing and be careful not only at the meaning but also at the form. Besides, the second activity is the discussion, during which the students speak and use comparatives. Therefore, these two activities help the students to produce L2.
III. Conclusion
As seen in the analysis of my lesson by SLA theories, my lesson – especially two activities - is designed to develop the students’ competence. It involves right hemisphere participation using its three functions: visualization, creativity, and sociability. In addition, I process my lesson so as to get the students’ affective filter low and stimulate students’ facilitative anxiety. I also motivate students intrinsically through making them feel confident and also motivate them extrinsically through letting them choose one of their writings as the best. Furthermore, I consider both input and output. I make input comprehensible by providing care-giver speech, and make two activities that allow the students to produce language. Therefore, the lesson is very useful for the students to learn L2 easily and to develop competence.
Submitted by Jae Youn
I summarize my final methodology lesson plan. The topic is about song. First, after greeting, I activate student to be interested in a song through related open referential questions, watching a music video without sound and mind map in warm up. Students become more relax. And then I check students’ comprehension by asking many questions and introduce past tense at grammar filling in the blanks and listing all verbs. In the step 9, students practice past tense through cooperative activities which are to make a sentence and write it down by partner’s mime in group work. And in step 10, I make students to write a letter of thanks to their favorite singer or celebrity who attended at the Sook Myung’s Centennial last Monday. I will analyze my final lesson plan by various theories such as “Risk taking”, “Intrinsic motivation” and “Input&Output hypothesis” in The Monitor model(Krashen).
The first is “Risk taking” in Affective Filter Hypothesis. Students must take risk in order to learn language successfully. So, teacher should encourage their students speak in English in several ways. That is risk taking. Teacher can help students through asking many types of questions in classroom language. In my lesson plan step 7, I ask to students open questions about students’ experience related topic, song using TSST individually. In the step 8, I encourage risk taking by cueing. I give a listening task to students to do during listening to the song or watching the music video. Students should get a hint such as past tens verb in the listing all verbs at grammar naturally. And in step 9, students should make error because they have to do activity in group. Also in step 10, students take risk in writing a letter of thanks.
The second is “Anxiety” in Affective Filter Hypothesis. In this theory, there are two kinds of anxiety, one is good facilitative anxiety and the other is bad debilitative anxiety. In according to Krashen’a affective filter theory, he emphasizes low affective filter. It means no anxiety and no stress in a class or lesson. So, I make students to discuss song that students like in warm up. I show the music video and draw mind map of song in order to reduce their anxiety. Moreover, I ask them to sing together in whole class. While I agree with him, I also agree a little bit anxiety. So, I give students homework or quiz in step12 by next class in order to promote facilitative anxiety. I think that facilitative anxiety also needs. And I use TSST comprehension check individually in all steps. I as English teacher play the role to help them feel anxiety of proper level, which is not too high and not too low. I think that these in my lesson plan are enough to analyze facilitative anxiety.
The third in The Monitor Model is Input & Out hypothesis. Input means language and caregiver speech and i+1. I give students understandable massage in the lesson. There are two kinds of input, which are roughly tuned input and finely tuned input. I use roughly tuned input that student understand topic “song” easily and meaningfully by visual material, music video. Watching it and listen to the song that they are going to learn , students can be more interested in song and communicate with other person with good emotions about song through discussing them in group work. I ask students to listen to their partner’s speaking in step 9. On the other hand, opposite to Krashen’s input hypothesis, swain’s out hypothesis insists not only meaningful input(understandable message) but also form(grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation). In my lesson plan, I make students to explain the past tense in step 8. And I make practice form(past tense) by writing in step 9&10. I think that students can build up their language competence though correcting students’ errors in writing a letter of thanks in step 11 feed back.
In conclusion, my final methodology lesson plan has many SLA theories such as affective hypothesis, input & output hypothesis, anxiety and risk taking. If I add one suggestion, I should given students instruction of activity in more detail. I had a good chance to think of my final lesson plan myself.
Submitted by Kae Hyun
Overview of the lesson
The lesson topic is ‘discovery Hong Kong’ that is information and advice of Hong Kong for people to visit there. Students in profile of my lesson are adults and language proficiency level is intermediate low. Target language is related to give advices such as ‘You should’, ‘You ought to’, ‘You’d better’ and new vocabulary are embassy, transportation and alternative.
During lesson, in step 7, teacher will activate students content, formal and linguistic scheme to predict the presentation and learn new vocabulary. In step 8, students have to find out some specific information about Hong Kong in reading text. And step 9, teacher will do storytelling using new vocabulary about her traveling in Switzerland. After hearing teacher’s storytelling, students have to put the pictures in time order as what the teacher told and then describe the pictures one by one in clockwise direction to retell the story using new vocabulary. In step 10, the teacher asks students to write a e-mail to a foreign friend who live in different country and will visit Korea in this winter. So they have to give some advices about what she has to do in Korea such as which place must go to see, eat and stay.
Theoretical justification of the activities.
Risk taking
The teacher encourage risk taking in with TSST in step 7. There would be other ways to preview or predict the lesson such as mind-map. But in this lesson plan, teacher uses TSST to teach new vocabulary, accessible. Teacher lets S1 ask S2 the meaning of ‘access’, and then S2 asks S3 the meaning of ‘ible’. Also teacher uses TSST to activate student’s content schema. She says ‘S3, please ask S4 ‘how can you get information about Hong Kong and then S4 answers the S3’s question. Teacher encourage shy students, S2 and S3, to do risk taking by using TSST. Trough TSST, students have more chance for failure of English because students are more pushed to think about grammar and context when they speak. Even though students make failure or error, they have to speak the target language frequently in the classroom to learn it. So TSST is better than mind-map for students to do risk taking in warm-up stage and this lesson plan follow it..
Teacher encourages risk taking by cueing. The more students get chances to speak English, the faster they would reach the success in learning it. The teacher tries to check Ss’ understanding by asking individually students to summarize the content of the text in step 8. The teacher cues when necessary. She does not chunk. She cues saying like that ‘ OK, use the answer of the first question’ or ‘You can start with ‘Hong Kong is~ ‘ in step 8. If the teacher gives students a chunk of summary, they have little chance to fail in target language. Students have to think still about grammar and context when they speak English to solve the cue and to summarize the context exactly.
I will give one suggestion for this lesson plan to encourage more risk taking. Instep 9, students do not take enough risks. They just try to retell what the teacher said looking at the pictures. It would be better if the teacher asked students to summarize the teacher’s storytelling in their own word or express their feeling as much as possible after looking at the pictures. It will give Ss more chances to make failures when they speak.
Intrinsic motivation.
The material should motivate students because the text contains advice. The
material of this lesson plan is the context about advice for traveler in Hong Kong. This material can create students intrinsic motivation because they can react personally for advice.
The teacher asks personalizing questions in step 7 and 8. Intrinsic motivation
comes from inside of learners. Students desire to perform the activity because it is interesting. While the teacher asks students question ‘If you have a chance to travel aboard, which county would you like to go’ and ‘what advice can you do for traveler in Korea?’ in this lesson plan. Those kinds of personalizing question motivate Ss’ intrinsic motivation. But step 7 and 8 need more personalizing questions. And personalizing question need to be more specific. For example,, ‘what kind of question did you ask to workers in traveler agency’, ‘Have you ever been to Hong Kong, tell us your experience’. Those specific personalizing question should motivate Ss’ intrinsic motivation.
The teacher uses advice gaps to motivate Ss in step 9and 10. The teacher
directs discussion in pairs about what the foreign friend to do and how she should do in Korea. They discuss to find out other advices. They would like to participate the discussion actively because it is interesting, not because of anticipated reward. It motivates them to speak and bridge the gap.
Input Hypothesis
Firstly, the reading text is from internet web site for authentic situation so it contains roughly tuned input. The text is not for study English. It casts a wide net, it means it covers Ss’ competence I, and i+1.
Secondly, all teacher’s talks are roughly-tuned input. She asks meaningful
question such as ‘what are we going to do?’ It is more interesting. The teacher’s questions does not focus on grammar. She gives massive comprehensible input by asking a lot of questions.
But we can find the finely tuned input in storytelling in step 9. The teacher
does a storytelling because she wants to show how the new vocabulary can be used. She wants Ss to practice new vocabulary after hearing her storytelling. I suggest that she should just tell her experience naturally not using target vocabulary. It would be more roughly tuned input. She can give more massive comprehensible input.
Ⅲ. Conclusion
The activities of this lesson plan is well designed for adults. Even though we can give some suggestions to this lesson plan, it contains appropriately risk taking, intrinsic motivation, input and output. Student’s goal of the class is learning English effectively. In order to do, teacher’s job in the classroom is very important for students to learn second language. The material and lesson must be motivated by student’s intrinsic desire. Teachers have to encourage risk taking and give massive comprehensible input.
As a future teacher, I will make an effort to apply a lot of SLA theory to my class. My goal is that my students reach to succeed in communicative competence. I will make an environment for them to acquire the language cognitively. SLA class was really helpful for me to design my lesson. I really thanks for it.
Submitted by Sophie
1. Over view of the lesson
ㅇ.The title of lesson: Baby animals
ㅇ Content: Grammar: be-verb matching with subject
ㅇ Vocabulary: piglet, kitten, calf, duckling, kid
ㅇ Objectives: By the end of the lesson, students should be able to identity 5 baby animals and speak according to the picture without teacher’s assistance.
ㅇ. Controlled Activity: Word Maze Activity
The teacher gives students a word maze board. Several members are in one group. One of them reads the words which are the target vocabulary items or the day and others draw a line according to reading. After finishing, next child reads and the others draw a line with different color crayon, they do repeatedly until each group member finish reading in order.
ㅇ. Less controlled Activity: A dice activity
The teacher gives a dice which has baby animal pictures on each facet, for each group. Several members are in a group. One of them throws the dice, and then others ask “What is this? What are these? The thrower answers according to the question. For example, these are duckling or this is a kitten.
2. Theoretical justification on the activities
A. Right hemisphere participation
The right hemisphere controls emotional, nonverbal, intuitive and sensory function. When we teach a language, as we use the Right hemisphere participation, we can teach a language effectively. Visuals are used in the controlled and less controlled activities, so those visuals stimulate students’ right brain. That makes meaningful context for the learners.
B. The affective Filler, anxiety, and motivation
According to Krashen, there are two factors for succeeding in a language, the one is comprehensible Input, and the other is low affective filter. In this lesson plan, students do two group work activities which are easy and interesting. When they do first activity, they do not need to worry about errors. Even though at first time, they don’t know the exact pronunciation of baby animals, they can ask to their group members, listen repeatedly and correct the errors without anxiety. The second activity is also similar, as they play a dice game they do not need that they are learning a language. They acquire a language expression without conscious effort just through play. So this lesson is designed with low affective Filler and low anxiety, nevertheless most children like to play a game.
C. Input and Output
Krashen said that when there are much roughly tuned input (caregiver speech, teachers’ talk and foreigner’s talk), if they can understand the content, the learners can acquire i+1 easily. In this lesson the learners can get much roughly tuned Input from their friend while doing two activities. Swain said that when the learners produce the output, they realize the gap between what they know and what they can produce. In this lesson there is much student’s language production, so they can perceive their real ability.
3. Conclusion
As a teacher, when I design a lesson plan, I have to consider the students’ participation. It must elicit students’ participation through interesting activity. As I used various materials which attract students’ interesting, it was always more effective and activated their schema. When there was group work, they participated in class actively and produced much output. The output also can be Input for other students.
Submitted by Hyeon
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
I. Overview of the lesson.
I selected a lesson from my methodology lesson plan. The class appeared in the lesson is planned for reading. The topic of a reading context is an acupuncture treatment. Through this lesson, students will learn new vocabulary related to an acupuncture treatment, one target grammar and the process of an acupuncture treatment. They will go through many kinds of activities that make them use right hemisphere of their brains.
II. Theoretical justification of the activities
In the warm-up, I have the students brainstorm about eastern medicine and Chinese medicine and then, take examples of them and I draw a mind map on the board to visualize the examples. From this, Students do pair-work for sociability and visualizing a mind map stimulates the student to use right side of the brain. In the presentation, first, I get the student to skim the picture came with reading text, and then students describe what the picture looks like, imagining what the reading text will be about and discuss the topic. Through this process, students use artistic sensibility by describing the picture, imaginativity by imagining the topic of the reading text and sociability by discussing with each other. Next, while explaining vocabulary, I use a lot of realia and make the students fill in the chart to help the students understand the meaning better by visualizing. Other than that, when it comes to focus questions about the reading text, I have the students do pair-work and group work to find the answers and to make them use sociability. Besides, for creativity, I ask the students open questions after focus questions.(ex.What makes you answer like that?)
III. Conclusion
When making a lesson plan, it is very important to apply communicative language teaching techniques and to help them utilize their right hemisphere of the brains. I am sure that by end of this lesson, students learn and acquire language through the tactics for having the students concentrate on right functions of the brain.
Submitted by Hyuna
I. Overview of the lesson
In my lesson plan, the students profile is novice-high and middle school students. My lesson plan is listening task about how to make a volcano. The material is handout, pictures, CD, and white board. My students like activities. And they enjoy interacting with other friends through game. In warn-up, I make students for activate schemata using mind map. I ask students such as “What come to your mind when you hear “volcano”?.” I use many classroom interactions. In presentation, after I make students to listen to CD, I explain content by many comprehension check and classroom interaction. And I use one activity for student to understand about content. And I teach grammar such as commands inductively. In step 9, it is controlled activity using speaking. And in step 10, it is less controlled activity using writing. Because my students’ profile is novice-high in my lesson plan I use two controlled activities. In step 9, I make student to speak about the notice of science class after students look at the pictures. In step 10, after I give students to role as a teacher, I make students to make their own rule of school freely.
II. Theoretical justification of the activities
Right hemisphere participation
In my lesson plan, my students are puberty, so I use three activities as visualization, sociability, creativity, imagination. After puberty, functions of brain are fixed and they tend to use left hemisphere. So I use some activities that could use right hemisphere. Visualization make language easier to remember and pictures are more meaningful. In Sociability, when students communicate with people, language is more important. In creativity, if students practice using language rules by creating new language, they get competence. In imagination, when students use their imagination at the same time, language is meaningful. Thus, students can learn second language meaningfully. Therefore, as right hemisphere functions make language important, meaningful, and memorable I have to use visualization, sociability, creativity, and imagination for my students’ second language acquisition meaningfully. So my students get competence.
The Affective Filter, anxiety, and motivation
In affective filter, if students have high affective filter, it becomes more difficult to pick up new language. So students can’t acquire language. When I find student who have high affective filter, I have to give student high confidence, high motivation, and high self-esteem. So in my presentation, for give confidence, I make comfortable class and I help students’ language acquisition by many comprehensible inputs. But I also give students to challengeable anxiety for meaningful second language acquisition. Because a little bit anxiety makes students better attention, participate more, take better note, and better prepare for the class. Krashen said anxiety should be removed form class. This case is called facilitative anxiety. So I teach students through discussion, group work and I do comprehension check. Thus, when students have low anxiety, they can learn language meaningful. Other wise, if teacher give students too much anxiety, students will fail to learn language. And it is difficult students to the language learning and their performance goes down. And teacher should introduce interesting material because teacher gives students to motivation. So I prepare various volcano pictures, I try to find interesting topic.
Input and Output
Input hypothesis says that you build competence by understanding messages. I think that for make comprehensible input, I teach students with chunking, let students find main idea. And then I preview the lesson with some questions that can activate schemata. All of thing that I intend to do can help students reach I+1 more naturally. These things can not only reach to another competence, but also understand new language meaningfully. As a teacher, I have to make an effort to help students make input comprehensible. In output, I try to ask many question for students’ output. In input hypothesis, fluency is important and accuracy is little important. But for both are important, I teach grammar. For successful output, we have to study grammar, vocabulary. And when we speak or writ something, we have to think grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation. So in my lesson plan, I teach commands and practice grammar and speak vocabulary through repetition. In writing activity, students have role as a teacher, students make their own role freely. So students can get a chance to practice and they write something and they can build up competence.
III. Conclusion
I have summarized analyzed my lesson plan by many theory. The first is right hemisphere participation. As my students are after puberty, I prepare my lesson plan with using right hemisphere such as visualization, sociability, creativity, and imagination. The second is the affective filter, anxiety, and motivation. I try to give students low affective filter and low anxiety and positive motivation. When students have low affective filter and low anxiety and positive motivation, they can acquire language meaningfully and successfully. The last is input and output. For meaningful input and output, teacher give students comprehensible input a lot and teacher help students’ comprehensible output through the many activities. When students practice language through various theories, students can acquire language meaningfully and successfully.
Submitted by Soo Young
My lesson final lesson plan for methodology Ⅱ is designed for intermediate-mid university students. The title is “When Don’t You Tell the Truth?” and the objective of this lesson is to teach students how to express their life experience using present prefect or past perfect tense. In the warm-up, students will tell about their personal experience of lying, and in the presentation, they will get main idea and find detailed information from the reading text. The reading text for presentation is an interview article from a youth magazine, and four people are talking about their experience of lying. In step 9, students write three sentences about their experience, and one of the three sentences should be a lie. Students will play a game finding out the lie. In step 10, students will write an email responding to an email of their friend who is in a dilemma where to tell the truth or not. By doing this writing activity, students are also expected to learn how to give their opinion. My lesson plan can be analyzed based on theories of SLA in terms of intrinsic motivation, risk-taking and Hypothesis Testing.
My lesson plan is pretty well designed to encourage students’ intrinsic motivation. Firstly, the topic for reading text contains conflicts because it is about telling a lie. In the reading text, we can read about interviewees’ opinion about telling a lie and situations that they faced dilemma whether to tell the truth or not. Secondly, the lesson plan includes lots of personal questions, in step 7 and 8, such as “What was your last lie?”, “What was the consequence of you lie?” and so on. Thirdly, it includes information gap in step 9 and opinion gap in step 10. In the controlled activity, students will write three sentences, and among those sentences, one has to be a lie. While doing this activity, students have to find which one is a lie. In independent activity, students will give their opinion to a friend who is in a dilemma to tell the truth or not by writing a replying email. Since, this lesson plan contains conflicts and opinion in reading material, asks students personalizing questions in step 7 and 8 and includes information gap and opinion gap in step 9 and 10, we can tell this quite well designed to stimulate students’ intrinsic motivation.
This lesson plan allows students take a risk to make mistakes. In the warm-up, the teacher does TSST and keeps calling on individual students in every step of this lesson plan. In the presentation, the teacher provides students chances to guess the meaning of new vocabulary items without looking up their dictionaries. The teacher also asks high level of questions here and there in the lesson. For example, before reading the text, the teacher asks students to infer the genre by looking at the form of the reading text and let them predict what is the text about from the title. In step 10, students write an email to a friend, but the email will be posted on the wall later. This is quite risky for the students. As I stated above, this lesson plan has some good points that let students take risks.
My final lesson plan needs some improvement in step 10 in terms of Hypothesis Testing. Students will generate their language in creative ways while they are writing an email, but this activity ends with posting students emails on the wall and getting comments from their classmates. So, they don’t have enough chance to get right form of language which will allow them to change their interlanguage system. If it included a step for teacher feedback on their writing, students will be able to produce better language. According to the viewpoint of Hypothesis Testing, students have to have chance to use newly learned language that is in the leading edge creatively first, then they also should have chances for getting feedback so that they can improve their language proficiency. So, I would like to revise this lesson plan later to add one more step for teacher feedback in step 10.
I’ve analyzed my lesson plan in terms of intrinsic motivation, risk-taking and Hypothesis Testing so far. It is pretty well designed to encourage students’ intrinsic motivation by giving students materials that contain conflicts and opinions, asking personalizing questions in step 7 and 8 and putting gaps in step 9 and 10. It allows students to take risk in many ways such as calling on students individually or letting students imagine the meaning of new vocabulary items. Although this lesson plan is pretty good based on many SLA theories, but it still requires some improvements in the viewpoint of Hypothesis Testing to let students reprocess their interlanguage system. So, I would like to revise my lesson plan by putting teacher feedback step in step 10 based on Hypothesis Testing to make the lesson plan better.
Submitted by Julie
I. Overview of the lesson
As my lesson plan for applying four skills such listening, speaking, reading and writing, I am going to teach how to read pizza menu in a restaurant. The reason I chose the topic is children usually like pizza the most. My students are 16-17 year old high school first graders and intermediate mid level. During the warm-up, I am supposed to ask students some questions about pizza to activate their schema, for example, “Do you like pizza?” or “Would you tell us one of the pizza makers? In addition, I use some real picture of pizzas and ask the question, “Can you see what kinds of pizza they are?” to activate their schema as well. In the presentation stage, by asking some high level questions and trying to personalize, I can give my students a chance to think about their experiences related to the topic. During step 9, I have my students do the role play of preparing a pizza party using a menu of pizzas. This role play is designed as a gap activity because students are more motivated and learn more voluntarily. This means that they can focus on the meaning for a real communication.
II. Theoretical justification of the activities
A. Input Hypothesis
In relation to Input Hypothesis, the text material should be concerned to be meaningful for students. The reading material is the Domino’s Pizza Menu from its internet site which shows the choices of pizzas such as size, crust, or toppings. They can learn new languages while they focus on the contents of the pizza menu. The languages cover all from easy, familiar ones to more difficult, unfamiliar ones, so I can say they are roughly tuned. For example, as it comes to the toppings, most of my students know “pineapple, beef, or ham” ,but most of them don’t know “mushrooms, pepperoni, or green peppers”. In addition to presenting comprehensible text material, I can do something to make my students’ input comprehensible for Step 7 in my lesson plan. During the warm-up, I ask them some questions about pizza to activate their content schema. I think activating schemata is very important to make input comprehensible. Once students are activated what they learned before, it is very helpful and effective for them to understand the new material better.
B. Intrinsic Motivation
As far as Intrinsic Motivation concerned, students learn better and want to do something voluntarily if they are interested in what they are learning. I try to relate the menu of Domino ‘s Pizza to their real lives, for instance, during the warm-up stage, I ask them, “What is your favorite pizza?” and make them think and talk about what they like the most in pairs. Through personalizing, students have a chance to think about their personal experiences related to the topic. During Step 9, as another way for Intrinsic Motivation, I make my students do the role play of preparing a pizza party using a menu of pizzas. One is a wife and another is her husband. They want to invite 10 friends to their pizza party but they have special friends in that some of friends are vegetarians and some of them don’t eat mushrooms. During the role play, students have to solve the problem which is a choice of right pizzas for their party, and they get to use language more voluntarily to communicate with each other.
C. Right Hemisphere Participation – Visualization
Language learning is closely connected with visualization which makes language meaningful and memorable. That is, when we learn language with some visuals, it helps learn more easily since we use language to the right hemisphere. I use visuals such as pictures and realia, and gestures to make to teach students new language. For example, when I teach “curst” and “toppings”, I show them a picture and point what “crust” is, and then using gesture of putting on something on top of the crust, I explain “toppings”. Through these visuals, students can learn language more meaningful and comprehensible.
III. Conclusion
Until now, I’ve looked at my lesson plan in terms of Input Hypothesis, Intrinsic Motivation and Right Hemisphere Participation. First, I think I try to give my students comprehensible input which are roughly tuned or i+1 and I emphasized on the importance of comprehensible input in teaching and learning language. Next, if the input is more authentic or related to their lives by personalizing and doing gap activities, students can be more motivated from their inside and participate in class more voluntarily. Lastly, it is more meaningful and memorable to use visualization to learn new language. When language is connected to visuals, it has a deep structure meaning with them.
Submitted by Sook Ja
Overview the lesson
This lesson was designed to teach 5th and 6th grade of elementary school students in private institute. Their proficiency level was intermediate low. The students had learned English for at least 4 or 5 years. The goal of this class was to improve students' proficiency with 4 skills, which are listening, reading, speaking and writing. Most of my students were planning to study abroad in English speaking countries later. That was why the teacher should encourage students to use language in authentic context. Target grammar that I was supposed to teach was Wh-questions such as ‘what do you do?’ ‘what does he do? ‘where do you work?’ ‘where does he work?’ and new vocabulary words were ‘chef, security guard, police officer, lawyer, flight attendant, receptionist’. The objective of this lesson was by the end of the lesson, students should be able to describe people's jobs approximately 10 and talk about what they want to be in the future following the teacher's model and activities without the teacher's assistance. The text, pictures of jobs, handouts, strips where sentences are written, magnifying glass, grid and CD player was needed.
ΙΙ. Theoretical justification of the activities
A. Intrinsic Motivation
I think the material of my lesson was not motivating enough because it did not contain opinions, controversy or strong advice. In step 8, presentation, after we figured out various jobs, and I asked them questions for checking comprehension only. For example, they were ‘what are they talking about?’ ‘what are their names?’ ‘what are their brother’s jobs?’ and so on. If the materials are motivating, students can agree or disagree, they probably reflect what they are going to learn on their own, but this lesson is designed to give information. To increase students motivation, I should have add some questions into the lesson such as ‘ Do you think the doctor is a good job? why or why not?’ ‘If you were about to change your job, what would you consider for your future job?’ However, when I explained the new vocabulary words, I used pictures instead of just giving information and it made students more interested in the lesson.
The topic of this lesson was personalized. In step 7, warm-up, I asked my students what they wanted to be in the future and they could share their ideas with classmate and also the topic made students motivated because they are all interested about their future jobs. In addition, in step 8, I asked students questions such as ‘have you seen this woman or man before?’, ‘where did you see them in reality?’ and I think these questions made the lesson more relevant to their reality and I tried to elicit the answers from their personal experience.
In step 9 and 10, activities were not motivating because there were not many gaps that students had to fill in and I only tried to make my class fun through activities not much caring about conveying meaningful messages. I only tried to help them memorize the new words and sentences. The controlled activity was that one student chose one strip of the new sentence; he or she read the sentence without any sound to their group member. They were supposed to show their mouth with a magnifying glass so that their group members could guess the sentence better and it made the classroom fun but I think there was lack of communication language. I think I should have focused on how much students can use real communication language meaningfully when I designed activities to make the lesson motivating.
B. Risk-taking
I tried to encourage my students to take a risk in the class. First of all I called on individual students’ name in step 7, 8, 9 and 10 and tried to have only one student answer the questions instead of repeating chorally. When they have a problem making the sentence correctly, I cued instead of modeling language. In step 7, warm-up, I used T-S-S-T for a question ‘when you grow up what do you want to be’ and students’ level was intermediate low, so they had difficulty making this sentence because it has a conjunction. In addition, when students answered the question with just one word, I almost always encouraged them to say that in a full sentence and when they had a problem with grammar, I modeled language so that they could try one more time. Lastly, I gave my students positive feedback to provide a friendly atmosphere where errors and common and errors so that they can feel free to say anything without hesitation.
In step 12, closure, the homework also encouraged students to take a risk. The homework was they had to write about what they want to be in the future and why they want to have that job. We were supposed to make a school paper and writings were supposed to be published in the paper. Everybody in the school can see the paper, so they would take a risk writing homework without any grammar mistakes. Thus, overall this lesson was designed to encourage students to take a risk.
ΙΙΙ. Conclusion
I have 5 years’ teaching experience and I learned English from junior high in Korea, so I knew that there was problem in English education in Korea. Thus, I always tried to help my students improve their proficiency, but I also found myself accustomed to Koreans’ deductive style of education while analyzing my lesson. I think that is why my lesson plan had a lot of problem. I actually did not give students that much freedom to talk and expected them to speak correctly in the activities and they did not have many opportunities to try out new forms. Moreover, questions were not so meaningful. They seemed to be designed to check students’ comprehension only. After analyzing my lesson plan, I feel like I got to know how I should teach students in Korea and the teacher’s job is really important. The teacher should always encourage students to take a risk and try to motivate them depending on their level. In addition, the teacher should make sure whether the material is authentic and students get enough input and the teacher asks communicative questions to students. Finally, it is really important that students have enough time to try out new forms of language. If I consider those matters, I am sure that I can go to the next level as an English teacher.
Ⅰ. Overview the lesson
I planed a lesson for final micro teaching in Methodology Ⅱ class. My lesson plan's objective is describing one's monster using the vocabulary related with our body part, such as eyes, legs, arms, noses, teeth with number. My student profile is 3rd graders in elementary school, and they already can do numbering in English.
In the warm up stage, I review the last lesson by counting number with fingering, and activate students' schema by asking 'Have you heard/seen a monster?' and miming about the word 'scary'.
In the presentation, I read a book 'What do you see?' with listening task, counting number with fingering. And the next listening task is to point out the partner's body part while I'm reading a book with motion.
In the guided practice, I planed a card game, the game is matching word cards of slash sentences to picture cards of body part.
In the independent stage, I planed a role play with the movie poster "Monster House" in pairs. We pretend that there are a monster house in our neighborhood and 2 children are about to visit the monster house. But one of them want to see a monster and isn't scared about the monster, so this child wants to draw a picture of the monster and show it to friends. On the contrary, another child is scared about the monster and don't want to see the monster. So another child asked to other child to see a monster and tell me, then I'll draw it. So one is speaking about a monster and the other is drawing what the partner say.
In the feedback and closure stage, I ask to students to describe other's monster and correct error about plural ～s, and I'll give a homework about word searching about the vocabulary that they learned.
Ⅱ. Theoretical Justification of the Activities
A. Right Hemisphere Participation
Because students’ age is young, they can't concentrate on the activities using logic. So I want to activate students' right hemisphere function. To do that students need various activities with are able to stimulate their emotion, artistic sense, sociability, creativity, imagination, visualization. Therefore I planed activities such as using movie poster, matching word cards to picture cards, counting number with fingering, and point out the partners' body while listening the story and those kinds of activities can be related to visualization. Also students need to draw a one's own monster so that can activate their creativity, artistic sense and sociability. And students imagine they are standing in front of the monster house in their neighborhood, so this activity can simulate their imagination.
B. The Affective Filter, Anxiety and Motivation
Affective frame work shows the relationship between emotions and CPH (Critical Period Hypothesis). It comes from ego psychology that we have our own ego and certain kinds of behavior can hurt our ego. We usually avoid because these kinds of behavior can be threaten to our ego. For instance, adults usually avoid the opportunity to use target language because they aren't good at that language, so they worry about being looked like foolish, because of their low language proficiency. On the contrary, children have flexible ego, so they usually don't have much anxiety producing target language. But if the teacher insists only correct, perfect answer strictly, even though children loose their interest. So in the lesson plan, I reflect the students' error and use choral repetition. These ways can reduce students' anxiety about producing the correct answer.
C. Input and Output
According to Krashen, input is essential thing to acquire language naturally; especially roughly tuned input is more effective to acquire target language than finely tuned input. In the lesson plan, I use lots of classroom language in English, so it's can be a good example of input. But I tried to focus on care giver speech, and the material is also focused on their current English proficiency, such as using children story book, simplifying sentence instead of using present perfect or complicate sentence. So these sorts of things can't satisfy the condition of roughly input.
On the contrary, according to the output hypothesis, only input isn't enough to acquire language. We need to practice target language such as speaking or writing. Producting target language (output) has several advantages over comprehension. Output gives opportunity to recognize one's own current level (what can I use or not) and also test their hypothesis (Is it right? or Can I use is?). So in the lesson plan, there are opportunity to use English such as classroom interaction, TSST, role play, making and speaking a sentence with given slash sentence word cards.
Ⅲ. Conclusion
In the lesson plan, by various kinds of activities, students can stimulate their right hemisphere. They can use their own imagination, creativity, artistic sense, building social relationship by activities such as, role play, TPR, drawing a picture, miming, and card game. Input is focused on the care giver speech. However roughly tuned input isn't enough. Using classroom interaction and doing role play can gives opportunity to the students to use English.
Submitted by Ji Eun
I. Overview of the lesson
The topic of my final lesson plan is ‘showing the way’. My students are 1st grade in middle school and their proficiency level are all intermediate-low except novice-high level of writing. In warm-up, I ask questions, ‘when do we need other’s help’ and ‘when did you help others’ in order to activate students’ schemata regarding giving and asking direction. In presentation, I explain vocabulary shown on a map (visual) and teach the expressions of giving and asking directions and the location (across from, behind etc.).In step 9, I will give a handout, which is a kind of map, where Alibaba has to find a cave full of treasures. It is required that students should give him correct directions to help him. As a competitive game, if a student gives incorrect directions, the chance will go to the next person. In step 10, students will write a few sentences to explain the picture they want to visit or live in again, which they are supposed to bring. After describing the picture to the partner, the speaker will give directions to find it and the other will draw it on the paper. Finally, the listener will tell it again to the speaker.
II. Right hemisphere participation
According the Neurological Framework, the reason why children is more successful in learning language than adults who spends more time in studying language is that they use their right hemisphere fully. Although the part that domains the language skill is left one, to use right side of the brain as well which make use of visualization, emotion, sociability, creativity and imagination. When we use both part of the brain in learning language, we remember it well because we learn it more meaningfully. Before puberty, because lateralization, the function of each part is moving each other in using the brain, is not completed, children use the right-sided brain in memorizing something. However, the people who are beyond puberty get help from the right one when they learn language, so they become poor learners. Hence, when teacher teach language, we encourage them to use their right side of the brain actively. I make my lesson plan using this concept
In this lesson plan, I tried to use as many visuals as possible because my students are young and do not reach a certain stage yet where they may self-motivated in learning English. In warm-up, the intention of my questions about helping or getting help other is to make them get involved in the lesson through personalized questions. In the light of Right hemisphere function, learners can learn better when the meaning is associated with emotion. Therefore, the feeling that they had when they appreciated others’ help and the reverse of it is expected to assist them to bridge their previous experience and what they are taught. Furthermore, I give them to think and share their ideas with their partner, which allows them to use authentic language.In step 8, what I consider most to make input comprehensible is to use visual materials. To explain the language points, I prepare a board which contains the picture of a road and a handout including some pictures as well. I believe these colorful visuals get their more attentions and help them feel less bored.
In step 9, to lead them to practice the expressions that they have learned in step 8, I create a situation. That is, Alibaba wants to find a cave which has a lot of treasures, but he is a stranger. That’ why have to help. In this context, I also use a visual to stimulate their right hemisphere and imagination to help them prepare them for future encounters. In addition, Alibaba from a fairy tales makes them feel more familiar with the activity, enabling them to pay attention to the activity. In addition, this kind of game is thought to enhance their sociability, which is the genuine purpose of learning language. In step 10, my students are supposed to bring a picture and write short messages in order to prepare to describe it to their partner. The partner listens to the speaker and draws a map to find the place as he or she listens to. After that, the listener will tell it again to be checked. In this process, I intend that my students use their emotion ( the picture that they want to visit or live in again), creativity(create some messages about the place),artistic sensibility(draw a map)and sociability(conversation with the partner). The teacher models this activity in instructions, using my picture and Power Point. Although I do not teach it in practice yet, I hope this lesson plan will go as I plan to and help my students learn with more ease and interest.
III. Conclusion
In this lesson plan, I strive to help my students use their both hands as much as possible. In particular, to draw out the function of their right hemisphere, I think many visuals (pictures, a board) and situation connected with their emotion, sociability( conversation with other students)and imagination(preparing a situation previously) are utilize enough. This must be of great help to them because they have opportunities to use their right-sided brain which leads them to learn more meaningfully. Consequently, teachers are required to make students use their more functional part for remembering. Although they are beyond puberty, we, teachers, can assist them in learning language to stimulate their brain. In conclusion, whether a learner becomes successful depends on not only the learner but also the teacher who assists the learners to use their ability fully.
Submitted by Soo Jeong
I. Overview of the lesson
The lesson, titled ‘Chinese Superstitions’, is designed for 10 adult students, whose overall proficiency range from intermediate low to intermediate mid. By the end of the lesson, students should be familiar with vocabulary related to superstitions and be able to ask for and give opinions, following teacher’s model. The warm-up stage begins with students guessing the meaning of the keyword ‘superstition’. Then, students are asked to think of words related to superstitions which are collected on the whiteboard in a mind map. Finally, students are asked to describe their favorite Korean superstition in a think-pair-share activity. In the presentation stage, students listen to a Chinese woman who gives examples of famous Chinese superstitions and explains why she thinks they are popular among the Chinese, even today. While listening, students are asked to perform a listening task of ‘matching’ in groups of 4 as a competition. Afterwards, students engage in speaking activity where they, in pairs, take turns asking questions about the underlying meaning of each Chinese superstition, e.g. “Why do you think Chinese use red envelopes when giving money?” The activity begins with the teacher modeling the required language.
II. Theoretical justification of the activities
1) Facilitative Anxiety
Facilitative anxiety is promoted in three dimensions; inclusion of a competitive student activity, lots of TSST, and a frequent use of open type questions. The listening task is given as a competition (without a reward), in which groups must try to complete the matching task as quickly and as accurately as possible. The competition factor helps students stay alert, pay better attention to the listening text and more prepared to participate in the group work. However, because it’s a competition among groups and not an individual one, chances are low that the anxiety about the competition will turn into a debilitative one. As Krashen claims, group activities lower the affective filter (or the anxiety level) of the students. Second, TSST is a frequently used classroom interaction in this lesson. For example, at the very beginning of the lesson, a TSST is used for having students guess the meaning of the word superstition which creates more anxiety than having students come up with the definition in pairs or groups, as TSST requires individuals to create language on their own. In addition, in order to encourage more student talk in the classroom, the lesson involves a lot of open type questions, especially in the speaking activity, when students are asked to explain why they think a certain Chinese superstition has a certain meaning, which creates higher anxiety for the students than closed questions.
2) Intrinsic Motivation
With regards to promoting intrinsic motivation, the lesson is successful in some aspects and unsuccessful in other aspects. In the warm-up stage, students are given the opportunity to personalize the topic, when the teacher makes them do a think-pair-share activity about their favorite Korean superstitions. However, although the topic is not of an academic nature, the context is set in China and in this sense, the lesson could be demotivating for those unfamiliar with the Chinese culture or those uninterested in learning about the Chinese culture. The listening text, the main input in this lesson, mainly describes the different Chinese superstitions and does not have advice, opinion or conflict which can make it more motivating for the students. However, the listening task is a positive factor because according to Malone and Lepper, competitions, where learners feel satisfaction by comparing their performance favorably to that of others, create an intrinsically motivating environment. The communication activity in this lesson, where students exchange opinions in pairs, has a clear opinion gap. However, clear goals are not given in the speaking activity.
3) Input Hypothesis
Making input comprehensible is important for this student profile, because their language proficiency levels vary slightly. In this lesson, the language input is mainly provided in two ways, through the listening text and teacher talk in the classroom. In order to make the listening text more comprehensible to students, key vocabulary is introduced in the warm-up stage. Because without pre-teaching key vocabulary such as ‘superstition’, which is in fact the topic of the whole lesson, students are expected to have a hard time understanding the listening text. More importantly, the warm-up activates students’ linguistic and content schemata, and as a result students can use their background knowledge or experience to better comprehend the listening text. Linguistic schema is activated by creating a mind-map of words related to superstitions such as ‘fortune’. Content schema is activated by having students think about Korean superstitions. Pictures relating to superstitions of China are prepared as lesson materials and are posted on the wall in the front of the classroom. This will also assist students in comprehending input in the presentation stage.
Throughout the whole lesson, the teacher uses various techniques to make teacher talk more comprehensible. In the beginning of each stage, the teacher uses the technique of ‘preview’ by telling the students what will happen next. In all activities and tasks, key parts of the directions being given by the teacher are repeated or rephrased in more easy language. As for the speaking activity, the teacher gives an example of the questions and the answers to be created by the students, such as “Why do you think Chinese use red envelopes when giving money?” and “I think it’s because red is a lucky color in China.”, and then have students repeat the modeled language chorally to make sure that directions for the activity are comprehensible to all students.
III. Conclusion
The lesson plan was evaluated based on three ideas from SLA, namely ‘facilitative anxiety’, ‘intrinsic motivation’, and Krashen’s ‘Input Hypothesis’. The analysis shows that the lesson is successful to a certain extent, in encouraging facilitative anxiety and providing comprehensible input. However, the lesson requires more improvements from an ‘intrinsic motivation’ perspective.
Submitted by Hae Jin
I. Overview of the lesson
My students are the twelve 5th graders who’ve been studying English for 1 year in private institute. .Their speaking and listening proficiency levels are novice high whereas reading and writing levels are novice med. The students are active young learners and enjoy talking and playing in English. However, they get easily distracted. The target language of the lesson is positional words such as in, on, and under. The materials are text, pictures, worksheets and realia.
The lesson title is “Where is the Bobby’s cap?” Objectives are the students should be able to use positional words which are introduced in the text to make sentences in given context. Also realia and pictures are shown in warm-up step. In presentation step, students learn the positional words using the picture of a room and make target language personalized to students for example, they introduce their own room using positional words. In step 9, students fill in the blanks using target words and in step 10, as pair work students work with their partner to find the difference between theirs and partner picture with only asking and questioning each other. TSST and lots of comprehension checks are used in over all steps for making input comprehensible.
II. Theoretical justification of the activities
A. Right hemisphere participation
Language learning is related to the brain function. My students are about to begin their puberty stage thus, their brains have not completed the lateralization process. Students use right side of their brain for language acquisition while they are easy to be distracted during the class. Therefore, it is very important for the students to provide contexts which can stimulate their brain related to the language function as well as retain their motivations and interests without distractions. Thus, I choose students’ intact environment, students’ room as authentic contexts. In the warm-up step, preview the texts for the class and relevant realia will be introduced in order to activate students’ schemata., in the step 9-10, students may feel that they are fully participating in the class through the pair work activity.
B. The affective filter, anxiety and motivation
During the class, students are asked to make a question by using TSST. For the students who may hesitate to speak or are not able to perform, proper assistance from teacher is provided. However, it does not mean that I always model the examples. Rather, I provide a clue and meaning of the words (as a hint) so that the students can feel less nervous and be encouraged to try the given task. Right after the students’ performances, providing positive feedback is very important in learning of young students like mine. Even though they make mistakes, I give him/her a big applause or the other type of exaggerated positive feedbacks. Through the learning experiences, students may obtain the self-rewarding feeling of achievement, may not be afraid to take risks later on and in turn, may develop self-motivation for their future learning.
My lesson plan also emphasis on participations of all of the students. For example, in both the warm up and presentation steps, students are called individually to answer the questions for the comprehension checks. In step 9’s activity, students should fill in the blanks with what their partners say. Since the students have to fill in the blanks, students may have to pay more attention to what they are listening to and focus on their writing accuracy. Those combined activities can facilitate students’ anxiety and motivation for better performance.
In presentation step, students learn the target language-positional words as personalizing language. I explain the positional words and then ask student to describe their own room using the target vocabulary. Students may feel great interest in listening the other students’ descriptions on their rooms, and may get excited while they are waiting for their turn to talk about their own room to others. In turn, this series of class room interaction motivate students to practice the target words.
In the step 10, through the activity “find the difference,” students can get intrinsic motivation because this activity is performed with partners. While they are finding the differences on their picture, almost all the students try to find the more differences and faster than their partner. They get a kind of competitive feelings to each other in this activity. It motivates students to participate in the activity by making a question and answer their partner enthusiastically.
C. Input and Output
As a caregiver speech, in presentation and warm up step, I use lots of comprehension checks to make input comprehensible. In presentation step and step 9, students get error corrections when they made error by repetition or correct answer form in white board. In step 10, students are encouraged to ask questions and answers with each other by finding the difference of picture, students not only use the positional words that they learned in the lesson but also try to express their pictures to their partner with other positional words which they have not learned yet. I monitor their language and what they need to learn. And I can apply them to next lesson.
III. Conclusion
My lesson plan for the 5th graders, “Where is the Bobby’s cap?” is about the using positional words. In the lesson plan, the right hemisphere participation, the affective filter, anxiety and motivation, and input and output hypothesis were applied. By choosing students’ intact environment as the contexts to motivate and retain their learning interest/motivations, the right hemisphere participation was applied in my lesson plan. Hence, emphasis on the positive rewards to students, students’ participation, paired activities and competitive activities supports the affective filter, anxiety and motivation. Also, the adopting lots of comprehension checks, error correction in white board, and monitoring students’ words and incorporating the results into the future lesson plan support input and output hypothesis in my lesson plan.
Submitted by So Youn
My lesson plan was designed to develop students’ competence of asking and answering the questions about experiences. The student level of proficiency is novice high, and they are mostly 13 to 15 years old. To meet the objective of this lesson, students are supposed to learn present perfect tense, which is challenging for them to acquire. So I use some materials to help them to understand better and easier like pictures, game board, worksheets for activities. In addition, I ask many personalizing questions to activate students’ schemata and do a T-S-S-T in warm-up. In presentation, students listen to the dialogue and get the main idea of the text which is about the English riddles but contains the target content language, namely present perfect tense. In step 9 and 10, students do some actual tasks such as board game, survey, drawing a graph and describing it. In these steps, students have many chances to communicate with others and to test their own language. In other words, my lesson plan made a good use of some influential theories like Input Hypothesis, Risk-taking and Hypothesis testing throughout my lesson plan.
Input Hypothesis is the one of the most favorable theories to be applied in the classroom. According to Input Hypothesis, the teacher should provide students comprehensible input, which means meaningful and authentic language. So I try to make my questions personalizing and to design the activities which facilitate students’ communicative competence. The questions shown in warm-up are “Have you ever been to an amusement park?” “When did you go to the amusement park?” and “Did you enjoy yourself?” These questions don’t focus on the target language but focus on drawing students’ experiences. The personalizing questions are not only meaningful to them but also helpful to bridge the lesson and students’ background knowledge. It’s definitely easy for them to understand the lesson. The other example of comprehensible input is the activity like survey in step 10. When students are carrying out a survey to find information on others’ experiences, they will be exposed to various meaningful languages from other students. To sum up this part, the languages and activities the teacher provides should be meaningful and authentic for students to understand the lesson better.
Risk-taking is another considerable theory when the teacher designs a lesson plan. Simply to say, students should take risks when learning a language. Otherwise, the errors they have will be fossilized without knowing they have errors. So the teacher’s job is to nicely push students to do actual tasks like asking and answering questions, reading and writing and so on. In my lesson plan, I always call on individual students. This might be stressful for them to say in front of others because they are not sure if their answers are right or wrong. But this is the right reason why I call on individuals because students should say something and also they can’t pretend to understood what the teacher says. To add to this, the students in step 10 are supposed to carry out a survey on different topics like country, food, some actions, and books. It means they can’t copy others’ and they should do something themselves. So the teacher should provide many chances for students to do actual tasks so that they take more risks.
The last one I emphasized in my lesson plan is Hypothesis Testing. Hypothesis Testing means that students can reprocess their incomplete interlangauge, namely leading edge, while communicating others. More specifically, students can select the form they are not confident with, experiment the form, think it again and finally make changes. In step 10 of my lesson, students survey others about their experiences. They possibly can use the target language correctly however, some students might not. The latter might say incomplete language in their leading edge just to communicate with others, in other words, to get and give some information. If their language is fortunately accepted by others, they probably use the language on and on. But if nobody understands them, they will be thinking what’s wrong with their language, watching others’ language, experimenting the new language influenced by others and making changes in their interlanguge at the end. To summarize, survey in step 10 gives students a chance to reprocess their language while struggling to communicate with others.
When I reflect my lesson plan, I think my lesson is well organized based on a few SLA theories. Input Hypothesis, Risk-taking and Hypothesis Testing are applied to my lesson plan. The students can get comprehensible input from the teacher and peers by asking and answering personalizing questions and by gathering information from other students. The teacher designed some actual tasks students can involve themselves and take risks in. Also, the survey in step 10 is an independent activity which lets students reprocess their language through trials and errors. However, there are still some parts which can be more improved and developed. The teacher should provide various materials to give more comprehensible input. In this lesson plan, main comprehensible input is asking personalizing questions but the teacher can enrich the input by letting them surfing on the net to find the experiences of others who have been to other countries. To sum up, many SLA theories have their own benefits and the teacher’s job is to create the lesson plan to satisfy various students by combining the beneficial theories and applying them appropriately in the lesson plan.
Submitted by Ann
Summary of lesson plan
The title of this lesson plan is ‘Eat Right, Stay Fit’ for 6-8 grade students for two class periods. The objectives are students learn what a healthful diet is and assess their eating habits to determine if they are getting the right foods to stay healthy and learn about the relationships among metabolism, calories, and diet. Materials are print resources, such as reference books and encyclopedias. For the warm-up, the teacher starts the class by explaining that puberty is a time of fast growth, second only to infancy. Secondly the teacher suggests that students should begin taking responsibility for their own eating habits, explaining key terms such as diet, calorie, metabolism, nutrients. Thirdly, the teacher tells students to list what they eat over the course of three days and write down. Fourthly, hand out copies of the Food Guide Pyramid and have students take a few minutes to look over it. They should make sure to eat healthy servings by explaining the terms of serving. Then, the teacher explains to calculate metabolism. After finishing a presentation, the teacher discuss questions such as How can this information help people eat a healthful diet? Why is it important to eat a balance of these substances in your diet?
SLA theory in the lesson
According to the SLA theories, especially input hypothesis, this lesson has a lot of input. Materials, such as reference books and encyclopedias, internet access are not only help picture-smart students but also make people memorize better. And using encyclopedias attracts students to be more motivated for the lecture. Therefore, it is good way to comprehensible input. In the warm-up, the teacher explains what puberty means and new terms. When a teacher uses language so that students understand the message, the students will take some of them which they are ready to pick up. And by teacher’s clear model with care-giver speech will make message more comprehensible. By teacher’s clear model, students would be able to pick up correct pronunciation and the right meaning of the word. For example, when the teacher let students guess what the meaning of the new words like ‘metabolism’, ‘nutrients’ in the context, students can memorize the words meaningfully and memorably. By guessing and inferring the meaning of linguistic information embedded in the communicative context, learners are able to comprehend vocabulary that would otherwise be too difficult for them to understand. In addition, the teacher gives instructions with hand out for Food pyramid, to give students clear input. Giving instructions helps when it is the major source of comprehensible input and examples of successful teaching methods give students lots of comprehensible input. While the students are listening what the teacher is saying, students would be able to pick up correct pronunciation, the right meaning of the word how to use those new words in the context. When the teacher gives instructions to students with hand out, students listen, and guess which all involved in input. Especially, reading helps learners to acquire language because people can produce language based on the ability to read. After finishing the teacher’s presentation, the class starts discussion by asking questions such as ‘What information do they give?’, ‘How can this information help people eat a healthful diet?’, and ‘What is the biggest modification each student had to make to eat a more healthful diet?’ By asking questions, students can pick up what they need in communicative ways. Furthermore, while they are discussing the topic, students would be able to listen to what other students think about the topic and they would be able to pick up grammatical rules in the context.
Therefore, this lesson is full of input hypothesis such as asking questions, explaining new vocabulary words, giving instructions, discussing.
Suggestions about this lesson plan
This lesson is full of input hypothesis. However, I suggest this lesson that for the material, they use print resources such as reference books and encyclopedias. Of course, there are some pictures on the encyclopedias, but it would be better if the teacher uses more pictures because the theme, food, is always fun to look at. It helps student participate in the lesson more. In addition, in the warm-up the process of asking questions should be changed. In this lesson, the teacher starts the lesson by telling students the meaning of word, puberty, first. Instead of telling students the meaning puberty, it would be better start the class what they had eaten for 3 days for a meal first. It would trigger students what the lesson would be and helps student find the gap between what they have been eating and what they have to eat. Lastly, two class periods for presentation by the teacher and discussing with students seem a little bit boring to students. For extended activity, if the teacher asks the students to introduce their own recipes, it would create more fun classroom environment. By doing this independent activity, students can generate their won language meaningfully.
Submitted by Ju-Ok
I. Overview of the lesson
The lesson is about the Heimlich maneuver. Students read advantage of it and some directions to do it. By practicing the vocabulary items, the parts of the body, and writing a persuasive letter, they can apply it in their real lives.
II. Theoretical justification of the activities
In the warm-up, when pre-teaching challenging vocabulary items such as ‘expel’ or ‘choke’, a teacher show its gesture visually and exaggeratingly to make them use right hemisphere. Also, recalling when they choke on food is helpful for students to have intrinsic motivation. In the presentation, a teacher expects students to guess quiet some challenging unknown words about the parts of the body. It would be a level of ‘i+1’input. Also, writing a letter to inform the importance of the Heimlich maneuver in the independent activity contributes, for them, to noticing their linguistic problems.
III. Conclusion
I think that using and balancing some theories appropriately is more important than implying all theory in lesson. Above all, what a teacher should do is always making effort to make input comprehensible.
Submitted by Gi Ah
The title of lesson is “Describing people” and I presented this lesson in the Methodology class with my group members. From now on, I will summarize the lesson plan and analyze it by SLA theories. It is designed listening and speaking practice for adults whose proficiency level is Novice-high. In the step 7, the teacher prepared pictures to pre-teach key vocabulary by having students guess the words. After that the teacher asked personalizing questions. In the step 8, the teacher gives focus questions and predicts the answers with the whole class. After listening to the audio, the teacher checks the answers by calling on students individually. At the end of the step 7, the teacher teaches grammar point which is the usage of ‘be, have, and wear’ to describe people’s appearance. In the step 9, the teacher does information gap activity by giving two different pictures. One student should describe her or his best friend and the other student finds who it is. Lastly, in the step 10, they have to think about their ideal type alone then describe to their partners. So they draw their partners’ ideal types on the worksheet.
I can analyze this lesson plan according to two SLA theories I’ve learned. They are risk-taking and intrinsic motivation. First, let me talk about risk-taking. There are two examples that are designed for students to take more risk in the lesson plan. For successful language learning, the teacher needs to encourage students to take more risks than they want to. It means that the teacher should let them know making mistakes and errors is totally okay and give them the chances to take risks. Here’s the first example. In step 7, the teacher pre-teaches key vocabulary items with pictures by trying to elicit the words from students. In this case, there’s high possibility for students to get wrong words and pronunciation. Calling on an individual student and having him or her to guess are also the factors for them to take risks. So it encourages students to speak target language and take risks.
There’s one more example in the step 8 when the teacher checks focus questions with students. Before students listen to the dialogue, the teacher has them to read the focus questions and predict the answers. It is also done by calling individual names. Reading written questions aloud is low risk taking task, but predicting the answers and saying them in English is high risk taking task. In addition, the teacher checks the answers in the same way after they listen to the audio sample. In this case, there’s also high possibility to get wrong content, pronunciation, and grammar as well. Those two examples I mentioned above are high risk, because all the questions and guessing are done by calling on individually and speaking in a full sentence.
Secondly, the other theory is intrinsic motivation. It comes from the learners’ minds so it’s more motivating than any other motivations. For motivating intrinsically, there are some factors the lesson plan should include. For example, materials need to have opinion, conflict, or advice, personalizing questions are good way, and the teacher has to give gaps in the activities to make them talk to fill the gaps. In the lesson plan, I can find those factors in step 6, step 7, step 9 and step 10.
In the step 6, the material, especially listening text has opinion. In the listening text, one man describes the woman who the other man will meet in the blind date. In the communication students can listen to two men’s different opinions about what types they like. So they can agree or disagree with. In step 7, there is personalizing question like ‘What is your ideal types?’. After the teacher pre-teaches the key vocabulary items, the teacher asks students ideal types, so that they can feel the lesson is related to them, because they can express their messages in the target language. In step 9 and 10, there are gaps which are information gap and opinion gap. In step 9, while they are doing the information gap activity, they can fill the gap by communicating with the pictures. Also, in the step 10, they describe their ideal types to their partners and they draw them. So there are the different opinions about the appearance particularly they like and they can bridge the gaps by speech.
It was not real teaching to the real students, but it was presentation. So I don’t know the actual response from the real students, but I can make two suggestions to make it better by using SLA theories. The first one is about risk taking. In the step 7 and 8, there are parts that allow student to take risks, but there are barely chances to take risks in the step 9 and 10, because the activities are pair work. Especially in the step 10, the teacher can call on two or three pairs and has them come to the front then they describe and draw on the board. The other suggestion, the personalizing questions in the step 7 is the same with the task they are doing in the step10, drawing partners’ ideal types. So the teacher needs to come up with more various personalizing questions other than that. For example, the teacher can ask like ‘Can you describe your girlfriend or boyfriend?’, ‘Can you describe your favorite movie star or singer? Then we can guess who it is.’ So the teacher can give more chance to encourage their intrinsic motivation.
Submitted by Alice
Overview of the lesson
The title of lesson is sandwiches using poem as a reading text-- Yellow Butter / Written by Mary Ann Hoverman. The students are 6th grade of elementary school students in intermediate-low level. I will focus on teaching grammar of imperative sentences with vocabulary related to ingredients and verbs to make sandwiches. Materials are poem text, a picture of bread, a picture from the text, white board and worksheets.
In step 7, I will activate students’ schemata by asking questions about having bread for breakfast using a picture of bread and present the lesson by asking students to explain how to make sandwiches to their American friends. In step 8, I will give instruction for using reading strategy. In step 9, I will ask students to write lists for making sandwiches given a worksheet with a list of words. In step 10, I will ask students to write recipes of sandwiches as a team of 2. In step 11, students will exchange writing with other teams and receive and give feedback given a peer feedback worksheet. I will give and receive feedback as class. In step 12, I will give students homework to read feedback and finish or edit their writing.
Theoretical justification of the activities
Risk taking
I will try to encourage my students to taking more risks because if they do not try new language or make errors, they cannot develop their interlanguage system. To do so, I planed to use lots of TSST through the lesson doing comprehension check or asking students about the content. TSST encourages risk taking because it brings greater chance to failure making students worry about their grammar and focuses on individual students—I also planed to call upon individual students as many as possible for this reason. To be specific, in step 8, I tried to teach grammar using the reading text which contains imperative sentences and I planed to use TSST for asking students about the text. They will try to use imperative sentences to describe the steps to how to make sandwiches according to the poem.
Next, I will cue when they ask help rather than give the answer explicitly. Although I planed to use some repetition, I will use cueing more than chunking. When chunking, there is not much chance of failure to students because I care about grammar and content. On the other hand, when cueing, it is the students who have to take care about the grammar and context so they must take a chance. For example, in step 9 and 10, whenever I gave instruction for writing skill activities, I will ask students to summarize the directions. At the same time, I will write keywords on the white board to help students make complete sentences when they ask help rather than giving the sentences directly. I will also encourage students guess the meaning of new vocabulary such as ‘spread’, ‘thick’, ‘thicker’, ‘quick’, ‘quicker.’ After all, errors are necessary part of learning a new language and my job is to encourage my students to take a chance so that they could be successful language learners.
Motivation
Since intrinsic motivation is more important than extrinsic motivation, I will try to make the lesson interesting to students so they could have desire to perform in activities because they are exciting not because of anticipated reward. In step 6, there is the writer’s opinion or advice about how to make sandwiches and my students could either agree or disagree with the steps, so the materials could be interesting to students. Materials that have opinion, conflict or advice always motivate students.
In step 7 and 8, I will try to make the topic personal so the students can see why the topic is important for them. For example, I will ask students questions like “What did you have for breakfast?” or “Oh, you can make sandwiches. Then…could you tell your American friend how to do it?” in step 7, and “What do you think about the poem?” in step 8. In step 9 and 10, I will try to make activities that are communicative and have some kinds of gaps because if there is a gap, students have to bridge with their language. In step 9, I will have students write lists to explain how to make sandwiches to their 7 years old cousin from America given lists of ingredients and that contains information gap. In step 10, I ask students to write a recipe for their favorite sandwiches and there are information and experience gaps.
Conclusion
After analyzing the lesson’s theoretical foundation by applying ideas that I have been learned in SLA course, I realize that it is impossible to satisfy all of them in one lesson. Sometimes, certain theories are conflict to others in some points like Krashen’s input hypotheses and Swain’s output hypothesis. In addition, I could found the parts that could be revised or more improved. For example, when I planned the lesson I could not much consider about right hemisphere participation, so there is a chance that my students lose chance benefit from it. I believed that the lesson plan could be revised after I actually taught students with it but now I realize that it is not.
The SLA theories what I have learned are foundation that I have to consider and reflect every time teaching English to my students. There are quite lots of theories in SLA, so it is the teachers’ job to select and apply it to their real teaching according to their students profile and purposes. I would like to encourage students try out new language and create classroom culture that higher level questions are valued and those will be the important considerations when I plan lessons.
Submitted by Seo Jin
Title – teenage suicide
High school - Social Studies
Grade Level – the age of 18, the second grade in a special private high school
Learning Objectives:
1. Students will be able to identify determining factors leading teenagers to death.
2. The students will be able to define vocabulary or phrase in the context: predisposing factors stem the tide, precipitating events, independent traumatic events and clustering
3. The students will be able to learn how to act properly when a friend or beloved one is suicidal.
Materials:
OHP for focus questions, a picture showing some teens sobbing in one of their friends’ funeral, a statistical chart showing the increasing teenagers’ suicide, reading text about Teenage suicide, listening text for four teenagers’ narration about their current situations
Overview of the lesson
To my surprise, the third leading cause of death for teenagers is ‘suicide’. In one recent survey of high school students, 60 percent said they had thought about killing themselves, and about 9 percent said they had tried at least once. The severe competition for good grades to get a college admission can be one of the factors making teens choose to die especially in Korea. This lesson plan was designed to make students know various determining factors leading teens to death and be more aware of how much it would be dangerous when they ignored or do not notice the factors, if any, in their friends or beloved one or themselves for a while. This lesson is also planned to get the students to think about some ideas to prevent teens’ suicide such as listening well to the one who is suicidal, persuading him/her to get professional help, or assuring him/her he/she is being loved. Moreover, by discussing the matter of suicide openly - no more let it be under taboo-, this lesson encourages the students to express their feelings freely and get some help from others whenever they encounter the things which make them depressed too much.
2. Theoretical justification of the activities
In the warm-up, to draw students’ interests in the topic and make students think about their life experience, I started the lesson with some personalized questions such as “have you ever thought about killing yourselves seriously?”, and “Do you know anyone who has ever tried or mentioned ‘suicide’?”, “If yes, what did you do for it?”. By asking those questions, I motivated the students to talk about their own experience, and then by having them predict the ranks of leading causes of death for teens among murder, accident, suicide and disease individually, and share their ideas in a group, I gave the students a chance to produce the target language. Moreover, by showing the statistical chart showing the increasing teenagers’ suicide to the students, I let them know how serious the matter of teens’ suicide is and ignited their interests to know about the topic more. In step 8, to give the students more input to understand the topic, I had them skim the text to decide which paragraph deals with each of the following topics A: factors leading to teenage suicide, B: things that need to be done to reduce the suicide rate, and C: statistics about teenage suicide, and scan the text to contextualize some wards or phrases that all refer to the factors leading teens to death such as ‘predisposing factors’, ‘precipitating events’, ‘independent traumatic events’, ‘clustering’ and ‘stem the tide’ in the text, and then I had the students answer the contextualized meaning of each phrase by using many classroom interaction such as T-S-S-T, guessing, paraphrasing rephrasing and summarizing to make more comprehensible input and output at a time and deepen the students comprehension on the topic. In step 9, through the listening activity --- the students have to judge who has the highest suicide risks and who has the lowest suicide risks after listening to four teenagers narration about their unpleasant current situation, I gave them to experiment with their new learned knowledge and make them discuss their own idea with others through T-P-S, I gave the students a chance to adjust or/an reinforce their knowledge by comparing theirs to others and motivated them to produce more output. Lastly, in step 10, before the main writing activity --- the students have to write a sort of diary telling what made them depressed most these days, to help the students get more ideas and be better prepared for the writing, I had them think the things making them depressed most alone, and then discuss it in a group and class, and let them know I would hand their writing out to another class to get some advice or/and opinions for them, and next time they also do it vice versa (Because I wanted to share the students’ writhing with other class, I made sure the students not to give out their personal information), I motivated the students to write their diary sincerely.
3. Conclusion
To make a lesson plan, teachers should consider a lot of things such as time limit, each student’s proficiency level and various students’ multiple intelligence etc, Even though, I tried to do my best to vary this lesson plan by using various techniques I learned to make students interested in the lesson, give the students more motivation to participate in the lesson, offer more input to comprehend the lesson, and more chances to produce the students’ target language, still I’m not contented with it. Who can be? I often hope to know the best way or a short cut , if there is, to improve learners’ target language competence successfully, but on the other hand, I think it’s more interesting to revise or/and adjust my lesson in accordance with students’ reaction to each lesson. It’s very time consuming and not easy work though, I believe the best solution can only be found by a process of trial and error.
Submitted by Song Ah
Ⅰ. Overview of the lesson
My lesson is for 8-9year old children, they have been learning English about three years. 3 years experience makes them familiar with teaching by the target language, English. They are much motivated by natural approach, which means fun activities, or role plays or games are more favorable for them than verbal explanations. Therefore I put more exciting activities that the children voluntarily take part in.
First I start a lesson with team games using cards. Divide the class into small groups of 3 or 4. Use some cards about school objects for each group. Have each group choose a dealer to shuffle and deal out all the cards to the group. Have students ask for cards they hold in their hands by using the question-and answer structure learned in the previous lesson. If the student is not holding the correct card, they answer the question in the negative form. Students must try to pair all the cards they hold. The first one to do that wins. "S1(with the card):Do you have any paper?" "S2: (does not have the card) No, I don't." By this game, students can go over what they learned(Some sentence patterns and non countable school supplies).
Next, present the new pattern: combining two sentences with but. Select a girl, a boy, and a pair of students to stand at the front of the room. Give them uncountable classroom items(glue, paper, paint, chalk, etc.)and teacher points to the pair, and say "They have some paint, They don't have any glue." Then the teacher adds the word but, connect the two sentences, and make students repeat, and illustrate has/doesn't.
Then, have students read the steps for making a paper dog aloud in the book, In pairs, have students ask each other additional questions about the reading passage. Then in paris have students make paper dogs. S1 gives to S2 instructions, using the book as a model. S2 follows S1's instructions and folds the paper into a dog. Have students reverse roles. Circulate, helping students as necessary.
Finally review some words and patterns using the board race. Divide the class into teams. Place six word cards along the chalk to marker rail. Say a simple sentence containing one of the new words. Teacher says "I want some glue", one student form each team races to touch the card that has the word form the sentence on it. The first team member to touch the correct card wins a point for the team. After that, finish this lesson by letting students silently read the sentences on the board.
Ⅱ. Theoretical justification of the activities
A. Right hemisphere participation
As the child's brain matures, various functions become lateralized to the left or right hemisphere. The left hemisphere is associated with logical, analytical thought, with mathematical and linear processing of information. The right hemisphere perceives and remembers visual, tactile, and auditory images. It is more efficient in processing holistic, integrative, and emotional information. It is important to remember that the left and right hemispheres operate together. Krashen, Seliger, and Hartnett found support for the hypothesis that left-brain-dominant second language learners preferred a deductive style of teaching, while right-brain-dominant learners appeared to be more successful in an inductive classroom environment. Stevick concluded that left-brain-dominant second language learners are better at producing separate words, gathering the specifics of languages, carrying out sequences of operations, and dealing with abstraction, classification, labeling, and reorganization. Right-brain-dominant learners, on the other hand, appear to deal better with whole images, with generalizations, with metaphors, and with emotional reactions and artistic expressions. The role of the right hemisphere in second language learning. This may suggest a greater need to perceive whole meanings in those early stages, and to analyze and monitor oneself more in the later stages.
I tried to use the ways that encourage right brain activities. I help students what we are doing and getting to know. I showed and pointed materials to make the students understand on their own. I prefer an inductive classroom environment. That's the reason why I focus more to students' responses.
B. The Affective Filter
Krashen has further claimed that the best acquisition will occur in environments where anxiety is low and defensiveness absent, or, in Krashen's terms, in contexts where the affective filter is low. The affective domain includes many factors: empathy, self-esteem, extroversion, inhibition, imitation, anxiety, attitudes. Any affective factor can conceivably be relevant to second language learning.
I tried to lower any kinds of barriers that make language learning difficult. I want to make students feel comfortable and easy to access to a target language when they are learning. Therefore I gave a lot of language input using cards and pictures, and sentence patterns that most of the students liked. And I made small groups of students, not to make them feel embarrassed when they might make some mistakes. In the small groups, students could grow their self confidence. Growing confidence can get students everywhere that they want.
C. Input and Output
The Input Hypothesis claims that an important "condition for language acquisition to occur is that the acquirer understand input language that the contains structure a bit beyond' his or her current level of competence,,If an acquirer is at stage or level i, the input he or she understands should contain i+1". In other words, the language that learners are exposed to should be just far enough beyond their current competence that they can understand most of it but still be challenged to make progress. An important part of the Input Hypothesis is Krashen's recommendation that speaking not be taught directly or very early in the language classroom. Speech will emerge once the acquirer has built up enough comprehensible input(i+1).
I always concerned about too much of new input. I didn't want to give my students a lot of pressure or stress. I want my lesson to go easy and simple. For successful lessons students' participation is the most important factor. If the lesson is too much for the students, they will be frustrated and afraid to challenge. So I tried to keep the balance between what they already learned and what they will learn. Giving students appropriate comprehensible input is necessary in a language lesson.
Ⅲ. Conclusion
Knowing the theories is another thing in the practical classroom. As a teacher I need to understand students and play a role of a guide to them in the journey of language acquisition. I will help my students endure some difficulties, face the challenging job ahead, and achieve it. Because I am a great supporter and confidence booster for them.
Submitted by Lim Kyoung Mi
The topic of the lesson is about insomnia. The students profile is intermediate mid, and all of them are adults. The materials which are going to use are four handouts, a picture, an article on web-site. They will be taught the target languages which are related to insomnia. My students are interested in insomnia, because they have to get a job, so they used to have a problem to get to sleep. The detail of the lesson, firstly, in warm-up, I will give them some questions which can activate their schemata by using a picture and various classroom interactions with some questions such as "how do you feel about this woman?", "have you ever heard of the word of insomnia?" and they will pre-learn vocabulary items naturally by having some questions which can activate their linguistic schema. Secondly in presentation I let them find the genre and main idea with skimming and scanning, and do matching vocabulary items activity, also they will do finding true or false activity with various classroom interactions and some handouts. Thirdly, each in controlled and independent activities, they will do a role play for giving some advice with a script, students will have a chance to practice language they didn't know, and in independent activity, they will send someone who has insomnia an e-mail for giving some remedies by using some suitable expressions, through this activity they can have a chance to practice their language. After finishing writing, they evaluate their writing for each other.
Comparing with theoretical justification of the activities, first in detail of right hemisphere of participation, I will use three activities to develop such as visualization, sociability, creativity in right hemisphere, thus according to showing a visual, they can try to remember something in warm-up, and doing a role play, they can communicate with each other, also sending an e-mail, they can practice using language, through these activities, they can use their right hemisphere. Second, in detail of the affective filter, anxiety, motivation, I will give students some questions which can activate their schemata such as "how do you feel about this woman?", "have you ever heard of the word of insomnia?" in warm-up. Students can have low affective filter through these questions, namely, before the presentation they can be a little bit anxiety for the lesson. So it can be helpful for them to have low affective filter, also they can have the answer more easily, and naturally with those questions. Moreover, those questions are good enough to have a high motivation, because they can be interested in the topic of the lesson by asking the questions naturally. Third, in detail of the input and output, for make input comprehensible, I will let my students rephrase with chunking, after finding the main idea of reading text, because it is very important and helpful for understanding the text, and I will preview the my lesson with some questions that can activate students' schemata, through this, students can predict the lesson and get ready for their lesson comfortably, also I will describe the detail of insomnia, so students can extend their knowledge. All of things that I intend to do such as repeat, rephrase, preview, describe can help students reach I+1 more naturally. These things can not only reach to another competence, but also understand new language meaningfully. I used to apply the teaching of grammar rule directly, it is finely tuned input, so most of students who were in grammar teaching environment can't speak at all, just focus on memorizing, not meaningful. As a teacher, I will make an effort to help students make input comprehensible. For output, I will ask many questions, explaining, ask for something, through these things, students can know what they have a problem, especially doing a role play, writing a letter are able to achieve the communicative goal, in speaking activity, they will practice their language which are related to giving some advice, in writing activity, students can get a chance to practice their language, during the writing, they will make an error in using some helping verbs. The most important thing is to achieve the goal of communication, so I will use variety of technique, and make comprehensible input, get ready to the lesson naturally.
As a result my students are adults, they've already passed the puberty, so they would feel difficult in learning a second language more than children. As a teacher, I will do many things, first, I will let them use their right hemisphere, because most of adults use their left hemisphere, it is not good for them to learn a second language. Second, according to activating their schemata, they can have a low affective filter, especially adults can be afraid what they will make a mistake, it is important, moreover they can throw away their anxiety by doing so, teacher's job is to get ready for the lesson more naturally, comfortably. Third I think input and output are very important, they can't be separated, thus if a teacher made input comprehensible a lot, they would reach to complete competence, so I will use various input comprehensible, and do some activities which can practice their language, and know what they have a problem. Most students can approach to their communicative goal if they had many chances like this.
Submitted by Kim Jin Soon
I. Overview of the lesson
I would like to introduce briefly my lesson plan which I am going to talk about here. It is one of my methodology lesson plans. To begin with, the title of the lesson is ‘The perfect cup of Joe’ which is about how to brew better coffee at home. This lesson is designed for adult students mainly in reading and writing class. The appropriate language proficiency of students is intermediate-low in all four skills which are speaking, listening, reading, and writing. This lesson plan is for practicing microteaching lesson, so it does not have step 9, but only have step 10. My students have been studying English since middle school, but they are not able to communicate in English well because of focusing on only grammar. For that reason, they are willing to learn English voluntarily as a communicative language and most of them are fully motivated. To satisfy their expectation, this lesson is focused on learning new vocabulary items that the students can use in real life such as tap water and airtight container in step 8. Also, they should be able to evaluate and give suggestion about making better coffee in step 10.
II. Theoretical justification of the activities
A. Right hemisphere participation
I am going to analyze this lesson theoretically by applying ideas that I have learned in SLA. First, it can be analyzed by the concept of right hemisphere participation. As it is well-known, after puberty, the functions of human brain are allocated to the left and right hemisphere, so that each side of the brain has different roles. For example, the left brain has logical, reasoning, and analytic functions, while the right brain has the function of visualization, sociability, creativity, imagination, and emotion. More interestingly, when people learn language, adults tend to use mostly the left brain to analyze the language forms, whereas children automatically engage the right hemisphere functions which make language meaningful and memorable. That is why children acquire language easily and completely. Therefore, the teacher’s job is to help adult students to use the right brain.
Based on this fact, I took a careful look at my lesson and found some efforts for forcing the students to use the right brain. In step 7, the teacher brings some pictures of ingredients and instruments for making coffee and let them choose whatever they want to use to brew coffee among the pictures. It is an attempt to make them use the function of ‘visualization’. To complete this task, the students should use some pictures and background knowledge in their mind. Another example for that is using a mind map when the teacher is asking about breakfast. The teacher draws a mind map with what she elicits from the students on the board. It is helpful for them to organize new information.
I found out that this lesson uses lots of pair works or group works in all steps. It is based on the fact that when we are with people, we use more language. It is called ‘sociability’ which is one of the functions of the right hemisphere. Every time the teacher assigns a task, the students have some time to talk with partners. Especially, in step 8, when they are reading a text with focus questions, they are likely to get bored, focusing on only searching for answers. During pair works, they not only find the answers for the focus questions, but also interact with other people. It makes the lesson interesting and memorable.
The last function of the right brain that I want to mention is ‘creativity’. Using language creatively leads us to use more language rules. In step 7, the teacher asks many open questions such as “How can you brew coffee at home with this stuff that you chose?” or “why do you want to know this tip?”. When they answer, they have to use language in a creative way, trying to convey meaning that they want. Also, the students have another chance to use their creativity in a writing activity which is step 10. The teacher gives a cup of coffee to each student, then after drinking coffee, they have to evaluate the taste of the coffee.
B. The affective filter, anxiety, and motivation
Secondly, the ideas that I want to apply here are ‘affective filter’, ‘facilitative anxiety’, and ‘intrinsic motivation’. I would like to start with affective filter. As we know, high affective filter can be an obstacle to successful language acquisition, because if we have high anxiety filter, we will get anxiety and low confidence which prevent us from acquiring language easily. Therefore, one of the teacher’s roles is to comfort students and help them have low affective filter. For that, in my whole lesson, the teacher speaks slowly just like caregiver’s speech. The teacher should slow down her speaking in order to make the students understand easily and clearly, otherwise they will get nervous and lose confidence. Also, TPS is another way of relieving their anxiety. In step 7 and 8, the teacher let the students think alone, and then do pair works, before calling on someone. They can have some time to arrange their ideas and practice with partners, which facilitates them to have confidence.
As it is stated above, the teacher needs to relieve the student’s anxiety. However, according to Brown, a certain amount of anxiety and tension called facilitative anxiety is necessary. The reason is that he cites that all relaxation is not such a good thing, which means being too much comfortable can interfere with effective learning. Therefore, it is better for the teacher to keep facilitative anxiety in class in order to make the students to pay attention to the lesson and take the class more seriously. The ways that I used in step 7 and 8 are frequent comprehension checks, error correction, and calling on student individually. Comprehension check is useful to make sure that the students understand, and also to make them more concentrated on what the teacher is saying. One of the common questions for checking comprehension in my lesson is “What did I just say?”. It really works well. Error correction also gives the students some tension which leads them to answer with care. The most powerful way is calling on student individually. During the class, they do not know when they are called by the teacher, so that they cannot help paying attention to the teacher. The teacher in my lesson hardly allows the students to speak chorally. She always calls on and let one student speak at a time.
A teacher should play an important role in giving new information as well as motivation. Intrinsic motivation is the desire that students have, when they are enjoying the class. In other words, the lesson should be fun and interesting in order to make students actively participate in activities. The most common way for that is asking personalized question. In step7, I used a question about personal stuff. For instance, the teacher asks “What do you usually have in the morning?” and the students give their own answer. Eventually, the teacher can elicit coffee from student, which is the topic of the lesson. While they are talking about their personal life, they can get more involved in the lesson by connecting their life with the topic. I could found out another case of intrinsic motivation in step 10. In step 10, the students evaluate the taste of the coffee, after drinking real coffee that the teacher gave. According to the theory of intrinsic motivation, there should be a gap in cooperative activities. The students have different opinions called opinion gap about the taste of the coffee, and it affects the result of their evaluation. By exchanging the opinion gaps, they can get more motivated.
III. Input and output
According to Krashen’s input hypothesis, we build up competence by comprehensible messages. It means that the teacher’s job is to make input comprehensible. First of all, in every step, the teacher uses repetition with a clear and loud voice at a slow rate. In addition, there should be individual repetition, after choral repetition. Secondly, using visuals is my favorite. I think it is the best method that makes students understand easily and immediately. I used various visuals such as the pictures and concrete objects of ingredients and instruments for coffee in step 7. Then, the teacher asks, “Have you ever made coffee at home?” and “If so, how?” as a follow-up question. It can be roughly tuned input, because it is meaningful for communication. It is clear that output is essential to improve our competence in balance. Output which is speaking and writing tells us how well we are able to perform the language and what problems we have. The teacher in my lesson gives the students enough opportunities to perform their language in step 8, such as asking and answering questions and doing pair work, so that the teacher can notice their gaps. In step 10, during writing activity, the students can experiment with what they are not sure or want to practice. As a result, the teacher will give them feedback, so that it will fill in their gap and eventually improve the students’ competence.
III. Conclusion
It was very meaningful for me to analyze my lesson by applying the concepts and ideas that I have learned from SLA. Before I started, I thought that it was going to be very difficult to find out application of the ideas in my lesson, because I have thought that the theories from SLA, and various methods and approaches from Methodology are separated. However, I realized that every technique is well-designed, based on diverse theories and hypotheses invented by expects all over the world. In addition, I found myself enjoying this work, although it was very hard work, so it got to be longer than I expected. More importantly, I think that although I am not a professional, I will be able to create good methods or activities for my real class, if I keep the knowledge or learn more.
Submitted by Kui Joo Lee
In my writing lesson plan, the topic was invitation and how to write a reply letter. I showed real wedding invitation card to the students and asked what we need that for. Students could have idea about the invitations and I pre-taught them 4 new vocabulary items like ‘pop the question’, ‘bursting’, ‘blowout’ and ‘RSVP’ that are shown on my invitation poster. As those vocabulary items were interesting and somewhat related to them around at their age, students got interested and had fun. Then I introduced a controlled activity as step 9, which was information gap, with giving instruction such as forming team, time limit and how to fill in the gap. I tried to use as much classroom interaction techniques as I could while doing comprehension check. Once they finished filling the gap by asking each other I asked one student to come up to the front and made him read loudly what he completed to the class. Step 10 was for writing a reply letter to host in polite way. I elicited writing prompts like form, audience, topic and purpose from the students and made them to elaborate each. Then they were taught why they need to write a reply to host and why it needs to be polite. 3minutes were allowed to think whether they can go or not and blanked paper was provided.
First of all, I think the topic was appropriate for the students since some of them are going to marry right next month and they were interested in expressions like ‘pop the question’ and ‘propose’ a lot. To increase students’ intrinsic motivation I introduced real wedding invitation cards with specific information on it and made one of them large to put on the board so that everybody could see that. Students even liked poster more than real one. Sometimes showing image like pictures or posters is more effective than just talking about it to activate students’ right brain functions. As they were taught new vocabulary, they were encouraged to make sentences with them by themselves. They asked each other “Did you pop the question to your wife?” and answer like “No, my wife popped the question then…”. By then, they were motivated to make invitations on their own as they were taught on the poster. Even though the form of invitation was fixed in step 9 and only some blanks were given to them, students were eager to fill in the gaps by helping each other.
In addition, before getting into the step 10, I asked a lot of questions to remind them of the previous lesson. They already learned writing prompts before and could understand what the important writing factors are. I knew that writing lesson easily can be bored and might be difficult for students in some way, so I decided to give them enough time to think and share each other’s idea for writing first. Such risk-taking has positive and negative effects on their language learning. Proper risk taking encourages students to get some tension and make them alert on what they’re doing. But extreme risk-taking, however, could cause negative result. Trying to write something in their own language was adequate risk taking activity for the students and they actually tried hard to make it, even though they felt difficult while doing that. Also students seemed like feel comfortable when they do group work instead of speaking to whole class. These examples represent how important for the teacher to adjust the degree of risk-taking and to encourage students to do better.
Finally, it’s important to integrate 4 skills when we plan an effective lesson so that students could develop all their skills properly and have confidence in language learning. T-P-S was a good idea to activate their background knowledge for independent writing. Variety of classroom interactions was beneficial to give students enough input and to make input comprehensible in many ways. Also we can expect much more student- generated language from that and it also can be a good chance for the teacher to notice students’ progress and what kinds of problem they have when some errors are detected. For example, I noticed that some of students in my class were having trouble to use some verbs correctly in certain sentences. Someone said, “I’ll make him to marry.” Other students said, “I’ll let her to go.” Those were overusing ‘to’ where it shouldn’t be used. I sometimes corrected them but they still made same errors. It was a good chance to teach the students those verbs that need to use original form after objective intensively. I let the students repeat what I said and practice those by drilling.
In conclusion, my lesson worked well as much as the students and I enjoyed. I tried most to make the lesson communicative and authentic. However, it would be more effective, if I gave the students enough time to think alone, share with the partner before actually begin the independent writing. They might need some more input or source to activate their background knowledge or think more creatively so that they could’ve done better writing. I also didn’t write down important things from what I said on the board and that made the students confused. For example it would have been better if I put “I’ll let you go.” And “I’ll make you marry him.” for the students and use them when I did drilling. Also it was important for the students to make their errors reprocessed in their language system. I should have encouraged them to correct it by themselves and allowed time to revise the errors since the students can learn effectively when they’re aware of errors that they made and try to reprocess it by themselves.
Submitted by Eunice
Step 1: Summarize a lesson. This could be a lesson from your own teaching experience or it can come from one of your methodology lesson plans.
If I teach reading session,
Title of lesson: The Farmer and the beet
Profile of students: the third grade at elementary school./ Novice low
The main objective of this lesson is the short story. Students are required to improve their basic reading skills through the short story which they have been exposed to in Korean. The basic reading skills are pronunciation, intonation, and pause in a sentence.
I usually divided the lesson into three stages:
1) Warm –up stage: Introduce the story in various ways to invite the students’ interest/ to activate the students’ schemata. I will give the impetus for students’ interest in predicting the plot of the story. I can show the pictures and talk about the title to brainstorm about the story.
2) Reading and comprehension stage: Read out loud in class and help students understand the whole story by asking questions.
3) Consolidation stage: Help students to consolidate what they have learned. I can do story telling through mime, acting out the story. In order to correct the students’ pronunciation, intonation, and pauses in a sentence, students should listen to the tape and read aloud as much as they can.
Step 2: Analyze the lesson's theoretical foundation by applying ideas we've discussed in SLA.
I. Overview of the lesson
Students will be able to read the story fluently, In order to do it, students need to ask and answer the questions in full sentences based on the topic. The teacher needs to provide proper activities to have students use right-hemisphere function to acquire the target language or main expressions. And then students will be able to understand the story and they will be able to do role-play during the activity. Also the teacher has to give homework in order to give proper anxiety or intrinsic motivation.
II. Theoretical justification of the activities
A. Right hemisphere participation
In the warm-up stage(Step 7), when teacher introduce the topic, for example, “The farmer and the beet”, the teacher have students guess or imagine when the teacher starts drawing things such as the beet, a farmer, a horse, a cow and etc. on the board. When the students imagine the new words using visualization, they can use the right-hemisphere function naturally and the language becomes meaningful and memorable.
In the reading and comprehension stage, after the teacher tells the story using pictures or realia, the teacher have students tell the story each other. When the students tell the story each other, they have to share storytelling together. As humans, the students will recognize they are communicating, they will know how to pick up the language. Also, when the teacher assign roles to each student to do a role play about the story, they will act out the story and then the students will use their emotions. It helps to use the right-hemisphere function as well, and the language they use while role-play, it becomes meaningful and memorable.
B. The Affective Filter, anxiety, and motivation
In step 6, the story (materials) is already familiar to the students, because most of them have read the story in Korean version. That’s why they can be motivated easily first. Even though, there’s no any conflict, advice or opinion, it seems okay regarding to students’ proficiency level.
While students do the role-play, if I record the performance, they can be more tensed to do it well. Also, when students are ready to move on to the next story, I ask the students to do VRS (Voice Record System) on a blank tape for homework. And then I correct the students’ pronunciation, intonation, and pauses in a sentence. From this assignment, their anxiety will go up and it can be the facilitative anxiety. This anxiety makes students pay more attention and be prepared for the class. Also, whenever I give some sweets or stationery for the best students who have participated well every once in a while or once in a week, they will be able to have extrinsic motivation. When the student gets rewards such as even some sweets or stationery, they will have high confidence. Therefore the students will have a low affective filter.
In step 7, 8, while I introduce the story, I can ask personalizing questions such as “Have you read this book before?”. Absolutely, I have students answer in a short sentence. Students, especially little children always love to tell about themselves, so it can make intrinsic motivation.
C. Input and Output
During the lesson, the teacher shows or explains the story with comprehensible input by using making input comprehensible techniques. For example, the teacher can use puppet and visuals to describe the story or the teacher can do lots of repetition and rephrasing. The teacher always has to consider about the students’ proficiency level. More than anything else, I focus on the meaning of the story to make it understand easily when I tell the story and when they read out loud and it becomes roughly-tuned input.
When the students need to act out by role-play, they can speak out while thinking about the right form subconsciously. Due to the students’ proficiency level, they won’t be able to do the independent activity 100% without the teacher’s instruction and assistance. Therefore during the role-play, the teacher has to guide and give some models, hints and cue to correct when the teacher finds out that they notice the gap. And then the students will approach the communicative goal eventually.
III. Conclusion
From the beginning of the class, the lesson has to be organized well enough to acquire the 4 language skills together even though I focus on the reading. The students activate schemata in the warm-up stage, and they can use their right-hemisphere function when they imagine and guess about the story. These imagination, emotions and sociability make language meaningful and memorable. Also, by using classroom interactions and making input comprehensible techniques, the students can be motivated and have anxiety to do the task. Even calling on individual student by name and having eye-contact with students can be risk-taking. The teacher gives comprehensible input when listening and reading, also the teacher has to guide, show model, cue, and give hints when they notice the gaps. Moreover giving homework to do VRS (Voice Record System) is a good thing not only to correct the students’ pronunciation, intonation, bust also to have students have some anxiety and intrinsic motivation. As this kind of lesson go over and over again, the students will accustomed to the way they learn and what they have to prepare for the class and it will make students have communicative goal.
Submitted by Susie Park
Ⅰ. Overview of the Lesson
My students proficiency level is intermediate-low and they are elementary school students. The number of students is 12 and the time is 40 minutes. The class is vocabulary class, so the purpose of the class is to practice new words. The target language is VACATIONS. There are many words, about 10 to 20 words.
In warm-up stage, I ask a personal question to my students. The personal question is this: "What will you do in this winter vacation?" I let my students answer using future tense. At this moment, I ask individually and write their answers on the board.
In presentation stage, I activate their linguistic schema related to the target language, by using drawing a mind-map. At this moment, I don't ask individually, but I just gather their answers spontaneously. The next, I give them some examples including the target language.
In step 9 and 10, I used two different ways for my students to practice the target language. One way is to understand the definitions of the words and make new definitions with their own words. The other way is to draw a picture related to the target language and make sentences related to the picture.
Ⅱ. Theoretical Justification of the Activities
They are elementary school students, so their attention period is a little short. Therefore, I motivate them by asking a personal question. They already learned the future tense, so they can use it when answering the question. In addition, this question is authentic and meaningful question. Therefore, their motivation or interest can be higher, and they can participate in the lesson more actively. I ask this question individually because I should focus on their output. If many students answer at the same time, I cannot concentrate their speaking, so I cannot help them fix their errors. The students cannot also focus on their production. It means that they cannot notice the gap. Eventually, they don't have an opportunity to fix it.
Furthermore, they try to answer correctly with anxiety. Proper anxiety can be helpful for students. With proper anxiety, they can answer more correctly and have a chance to focus on the form. I also write their answers on the board, in order to make them pay attention to their answers. Moreover, that is helpful for them because they can use their right hemisphere, visualizing.
In presentation stage, I also use the board when drawing a mind-map. Students can draw the whole picture of the new words in their own mind. It makes new input more comprehensible. At this moment, I don't ask individually, in order to lower their affective filter and I just gather all of their answers, not judging them. I help them speak with confidence. Some students without confidence can answer at the same time when other students answer. Doing this, they can have confidence gradually. And then, I give some examples including the target language. I give them comprehensible input by using examples, not isolated words.
In step 9 and 10, the first way is to let students understand the definitions of the new words. As doing this, they can make new definitions with their own words. I can check their comprehension of the new words. Moreover, they can have confidence and positive self-image by making new definitions. They have a chance to produce their comprehension. The second way is to let students draw a picture by using their right hemisphere. And then, they should make sentences related to the picture and I can check their output. They also notice their ability to make sentences or the gap which they have to fix.
Ⅲ. Conclusion
When planning a lesson, teachers should consider not only the method or material of the lesson, but also student's motivation, cognition, affective parts, and so on. A teacher is a provider of the language, not only a provider of comprehensible input. Therefore, he or she must focus on students' output. When the teacher teaches students a language, he or she can use students' right hemisphere. Students can practice and master the language more meaningfully and effectively by using their right hemisphere. The teacher should improve students' confidence and help students have positive self-image by giving feedback. In addition, the teacher makes students take a risk. It means the teacher helps students not to be afraid of making an error. The teacher also needs to use helpful anxiety, so he or she makes students pay attention to and participate the lesson. Finally, students can be interested in the lesson when motivation is authentic and meaningful for them.
Submitted by Belle.