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Lecture 17

Planning a week’s teaching

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To encourage teachers to think of long-term aims in their teaching, and to plan their lessons as part of a continuing course.

To show the importance of using a variety of different activities and techniques to motivate students and help them learn.

Review techniques that were introduced in earlier lesson.

Aims of this lesson

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The easiest way to teach is to plan one day at a time, to follow the teacher’s notes closely, and to use just a few techniques again and again in every lesson. This approach to teaching has two drawbacks:

1) it will produce lessons which are well-prepared and run smoothly, but which lack variety. As a result, both the teacher and the students are likely to lose interest.

2) different students learn in different ways; some students learn best by listening, some by repetition, some by actively speaking, some by learning grammar, and so on.

Introduction

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If the teacher always uses the same techniques, some students may not have the chance to learn in the way that suits them. in order to keep students interested in learning English it is important to include a variety of activities and techniques in the lesson, and to vary lessons so that there’s something different every day. To do this successfully, teachers need to plan not just the next day’s lesson, but think of their teaching over a longer period.

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It is not enough to introduce a range of different activities into lessons just for the sake of variety. The teacher needs to have a clear idea of:

What stage of the lesson different activities are suitable for;

Which skills different activities develop; What the learning value of different activities is

( what and how do students learn from it? Is it worth doing often or only occasionally?

What level different activities are suitable for.

Learning activities

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Presentation Teacher presents new vocabulary and structures

Practice Students begin to use the language in a controlled way.

Production Students use language more freely, combining new language with what they already know.

Review Teacher reviews language learnt in previous lessons.

Reading Students read a text, and answer questions or do a ‘task’ (e.g. completing a table).

Listening Students listen to the teacher or cassette, and answer questions or do a task.

Main stages of a lesson

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Now talk about the four skills: speaking, listening, reading and writing. Make these points:

At each stage of the lesson, activities usually focus on one skill more than the others. for example: in controlled practice the focus is either on speaking or on writing; during a reading activity, the main focus is on reading.

But there are opportunities to develop all skills at any stage of lesson. for example:

in a reading activity, students can discuss the topic before reading the text, they can listen to the teacher’s questions, they can write answers or do a gap filling exercise after reading the text.

Skills

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When reviewing language from an earlier lesson, the teacher can ask questions, get students to ask questions and make sentences, ask students to write on the board, and so on.

To develop all the skills successfully, we need to include a variety of activities at each stage of the lesson.

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When planning lessons, it is not enough just to plan what activities to include. We must also plan how to organize these activities- in other words, what teaching techniques to use. The same activity can be done in quite different ways and with different results, according to what techniques the teacher uses.

Teaching techniques

Teacher A Teacher B

1. Introduces the text with a short discussion of the topic.

Reads out a vocabulary list from the book. Students repeat in chorus

2. Gives a guiding question. Reads the text. Students listen while reading, then answer the question.

Reads the text aloud sentence by sentence. Students repeat.

3.Presents new words, using examples in English.

Students read the text aloud round the class.

4. Asks a series of questions on the text. Students give short answers.

Ask questions from the book, and give the answers.

5.Ask a few personal questions based on the text.

Asks the same questions again. Students answer round the class.

Here are two different ways of using a reading text

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To try bring out these points: Both teachers present new vocabulary, read

a text, and ask questions based on it, but in quite different ways.

Teacher A presents vocabulary in context, makes sure students understand the text, and gets students to talk about themselves.

Teacher B simply gets to learn the lesson by heart.

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Teacher A’s students would have practice in guessing the meanings of words, reading in order to understand, listening to words used in context, listening and responding to questions, and talking about themselves in English.

Teacher B’s students would learn a few set sentences by heart, and know the set answers to a few questions- they would not develop any language learning skills from the lesson.

( except the rather useless skill of reading aloud).

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There many different types of interaction are possible in the class:

there are various ways in which the teacher can talk to students, students to the teacher, and students to each other.

What kind of interaction would be suitable for each activity below?

Drills, question, answer practice, answering questions on a text, role play, guessing games, correcting written exercises.

Types of interaction

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Drills: a mixture of teacher to class (chorus drilling), and teacher to individual students.

Question/ answer practice: teacher to student, then student to student , the simultaneous pairwork.

Answering questions on a text: Teacher asking students in turn, or students working together in pairs and teacher going through answers afterwards.

possible answers:

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Role play:two students in front of the class, or students working in pairs.

Guessing games: students asking the teacher questions, or asking one student at the front, or students working in pairs.

Correcting written exercises: teacher with the whole class, or students working in pairs. (correcting each other’s work).