Didactic of English II

First tutorial
 Welcome to the ELT/PP 2. We hope you will enjoy
this module and develop your knowledge and
skills on issues related to it, we also hope that
this module of ELT/PP II will help you to develop
the professionalism that your work requires you
to have and also that it will increase your appetite
for further study in the field of ELT/PP
 This unit shows how individual techniques and
activities fit into the lesson as whole. We assume
that you are already familiar with the basic
techniques for presentation, practice and using
texts and it seems that you are able to draft your
lesson plan as well as to incorporate a number
of techniques in presenting vocabulary ,
presenting structures and practising structures
from the previous modules and units.
 If your notes are clear and detailed, then the
focus of this unit will be based on knowing what
it contains and using it effectively.
 Planning is often viewed as a key aspect of
teaching a successful lesson. During the planning
phase, the teacher makes decisions about goals,
activities, resources, timing, grouping, and other
aspects of the lesson. Harmer (1991) includes the
following elements in a lesson plan:
 a. Description of the class
 b. Recent work
 c. Objectives
 d. Contents (context, activity and class
organization, aids, language, possible problems)
 e. Additional possibilities
 Planning can be regarded as a process of
transformation during which the teacher creates
ideas for a lesson based on understanding of
learners’ needs, problems, and interests, and on the
content of the lesson itself. This does not necessarily
result in a detailed, written lesson plan. Many
teachers teach successful lessons based on mental
plans or on brief lesson notes. What is important is
not the extent and detail of the teacher’s plan but the
extent to which the teacher has developed ideas for
turning a potential lesson (such as a textbook lesson)
into the basis for an engaging and effective lesson.
Lesson planning involves decisions about the
pedagogical dimensions of the lesson.
 At the planning stage, teachers need to think about
questions such as what the objective(s) of the lesson will
be, what materials and activities will be used, what type of
interaction will be encouraged, and how the learning will
be monitored. At the implementation stage, the teacher’s
job is not simply to carry out the lesson as previously
planned. During the lesson, interactive and evaluative
decisions will often have to be made in response to the
dynamics of the class. It may be necessary for teachers to
adjust or even change the original plan when the lesson is
not going well. Having implemented the lesson, the
teacher must evaluate the success or failure of the lesson.
This phase is important as it provides an opportunity for
the teacher to reflect on what has gone on in the lesson
vis-`a-vis the objectives of the lesson.
 It is important to set up objectives of the
lesson. When you setup objectives, it is like
having a map to direct you where to go.
Objectives allows us to see if the intended
target of the lesson has been achieved and
help us to redefine and change strategy for
the next lesson to come. And also important
to know is that the objectives should always
be defined using action verbs.
 When you plan your lesson, it is important for you to know
exactly, for instance, what level of language you want your
learners to learn. Most lessons introduce either new
vocabulary or new structure, or both. Then bear in mind
these points:
 New Vocabulary: not all new words in a lesson are equally
important . As part of preparation for a lesson, you should
decide which words need to be practised and which only
need to be briefly mentioned.
 Structures: if a new structure is introduced in the lesson,
it will need to be presented carefully and practised in
the lesson, also considering what was introduced in
earlier lessons.
 Then, let’s now see other elements that are
involved in planning a lesson such as structure,
vocabulary, reading, writing and listening.
Remember that these are some of the elements,
so you can find more when we give you further
reading which is very important to do it on your
own time.
 The other element is skills. You need to know
and be aware of what skills will be developed in
the lesson. Is it speaking, reading, listening or
writing? You already know that, speaking and
writing are productive skills because they require
producing language while listening and reading
are receptive skills – they require reception of
language and not production. If possible the
lesson should include practise of more than one
skill, that is, it should be integrated – this will
increase the variety and interest of the lesson.
 To sum up, you may engage your students in
reading, speaking, listening and writing skills in
the same lesson without noticing and why? The
reason is because when you were planning your
lesson you planned it for one or two skills, but
when you go to teach you might have realized
that there is more than one skill involved. And
that is a natural process. For example, you
cannot speak without listening and vice-versa.
So, when you plan your lesson bear in mind that
there is a lot of process in mind of the students
than only listening to your lesson. And you, as a
teacher, need to take that into account.
 A lesson plan can be divided into a number of
stages such as Warm Up, Elicitation or
Brainstorm, Presentation, Practise, Production
and so on. The stages of a lesson plan may
depend on the type of a lesson that you want to
teach that time. Any lesson we teach naturally
divides into different stages of activities: for
example at one stage in a lesson, the class may
be explaining or pre-teaching vocabulary and
writing them on the board at another stage
students may be doing some oral practice, it is
much easier to plan the details of a lesson if we
think in terms of separate stages rather than
trying to think of the lesson as a whole
 Presentation: You present new words or
structures, give examples and write them on the
board and so on. Your main task at this stage is
to serve as a kind of a facilitator. You know the
language, you select the new material to be
learned and you present this in such a way that
the meaning of the new language is as clear and
memorable a possible.
 In this stage, you do the all talking – you provide
input (the language that students need to hear
and learn), while the learner listens and
understands.
 Practice: Students practise using new words or
structures in a controlled way, for example,
making sentences from prompts, asking and
answering questions, giving sentences based on
a picture. You need to know that practise can be
oral or written.

 The purpose of this stage is to activate the new

knowledge (schemata is a knowledge we have
about a certain topic, event, fact in our mind and
that when we hear or listen something we try to
relate to what we already know.) to the point
where it can be used automatically and correctly
in normal communication.
 Helping learners to achieve control over their
knowledge requires different kinds of practice:
 Controlled practice takes the form of drills which
requires the mechanical production of specific
linguistic forms. the learner is required to focus
more or less exclusively on the correct
production of the target features.

 Free practice involves engaging in simulated

communication which has been set up to provide
opportunities for the use of those forms that
have been presented and practised in a
controlled manner.
 This unit assumes that you are familiar with the
basic sound system of English (although not
necessarily with features of stress and
intonation), and you can pronounce English
adequately.

 We assume that you are familiar with the basic

sound system of English and that you can
pronounce English adequately. We will use
Phonetic Symbols of the International Phonetic
Alphabet, so that you can use the Standard
English to teach your students. Then let’s see
objectives of this lesson.
 Students may have listed that it is difficult to
distinguish the number three and the sound of tree.
They also might have said that they cannot
pronounce well the sound of think and the word sink.
They might have said that they confuse the sound of
high with thigh.

 There is no need to teach the sounds of English

individually; students are able to “pick up” the sound
system of the language by listening to you (or other
voices on cassettes or broadcastings done in English).
However, they may be particular sounds or sounds
combinations which your learners may find it difficult
(like those discussed in activity 1).
 learners may make mistakes in pronunciation without
being aware of it. In such circumstance, it is useful to
focus on the sound or group of the sounds which is
causing difficulty.

 The basic steps are for the teacher to say the sound
clearly in isolation so that students can focus on it and
in one or two words; and for students to repeat the
sound, in chorus or individually.

 If students confuse two similar sounds, it is obviously

useful to contrast them so that students can hear the
difference clearly.
 If the students have difficult in producing a
particular sound (usually because it does not
exist in their own language), it is often very
useful to describe how it is pronounced, as long
as this can be done in a way that students
understand (using simple English or their own
language)

 You could for instance say: Writing the word on

the board is not so important – the focus should
be on pronunciation, not on spelling.
Summarise the contents covered in the first
tutorial and bring on the day you will be
sitting for the test.

Thank you