THE PLAN

The plan has five major components: description of the class, recent work, objectives, contents and additional possibilities.

(a) Description of the class Teachers may very well carry this part of the plan in their heads: the more familiar they become with the group the more they will know about them. The description of the class embraces a description of the students, a statement of time, frequency and duration of the class, and comments about physical conditions and/or restrictions.

(b) Recent work Teachers need to have in their heads or on paper details of recent work the students have done. This includes the activities they have been involved in, the subject and content of their lessons and the language skills and type that they have studied, only if all that is known (or remembered) can teachers make reasonable planning decisions about the future classes.

(c) Objectives Objectives are the aims that teachers have for the students and are written in terms of what the students will do or achieve. They are written in general terms (e.g. The objective is to relax the students), in terms of skills (e.g. to give students practice in extracting specific information from a text) and in terms of language (e.g. to give students practice in the use of the past simple tense using regular and irregular verbs, questions and answers). The written objectives will be more or less specific depending on how specific the teachers aims are. The objectives, then, are the aims the teacher has for the students. They may refer to activities, skills, language type or a combination of all of these.

(d) Contents By far the most detailed part of the plan is the section in which the contents are written down. The Contents section has five headings. Context: Here we write down what context we will be using for the activity. Context means what the situation is: what the subject of the learning is.

Activity and class organization: Here we indicate what the activity will be and we say whether the class will be working in lockstep, pairs, groups or teams, etc. Aids: We indicate whether we will be using the blackboard or a wall picture, the tape recorder or the textbook, etc. Language: Here we describe the language that will be used. If new language is to be introduced we will list some or all the models. If the activity is an oral communicative activity we might only write unpredictable. Otherwise we may write advice language, for example, and give some indication of what kind of language items we expect. Possible problems: Many activities are expected to be problematic in some way. We can often anticipate that the new language for a presentation stage may cause problems because of its form. We should be aware of these possible problems and have considered ways of solving them. Certain activities have complicated organization. Again we should be aware of this and know how to overcome it.

(e) Additional possibilities Here we write down other activities we could use if it becomes necessary (e.g. if we get through the plan quicker than we thought or if one of our activities has to be stopped because it is not working well).