CONCEPTS AND THE LANGUAGE TEACHING CLASSROOM

A LESSON PLAN
Look carefully at this lesson plan, which aims to introduce and practice language for describing people.

Lesson plan components

Level and number of learners/class profile 24 students at Intermediate (B2) level
Timetable fit Students have already worked on simple descriptions of people
Main aim (s) To extend range of vocabulary for describing people Oral fluency practice
Subsidiary aims Students use appropriate language for basic physical descriptions
Assumptions Students can use present simple & past simple to describe habits and past
events
Anticipated problem Students may be unwilling to repeat the same task in the last stage of the
lesson
Possible solution If necessary, suggest that students report description from their original
partner rather than repeating their own
Timing Procedure Stage aims Aids and materials Interaction pattern
5 minutes Students talk about their families Warmer/lead-in: to Family photographs Pairwork
get students talking brought in by students
and introduce the
topic
10 minutes Students select appropriate To introduce new Short gapped transcripts Individual work –
adjectives to complete vocabulary Recorded dialogues pairwork
descriptions of family members CD player
in transcripts of mini-dialogues

They listen to the mini-dialogues

and check understanding

Intensive listening
10 minutes Students exchange information To give students (none) Pairwork
about their own family members fluency practice:
describing (Teacher monitors)
personalities,
habitual behaviors
and specific past
events
10 minutes Teacher gives feedback on To highlight need for Teacher’s notes Teacher – whole class
language used new language Whiteboard
Individual work
Students do gap-fill task To introduce new
language Worksheet

To focus on accuracy
10 minutes Students repeat family To provide an (none) Pairwork (new
description opportunity for partners)
task students to improve
their spoken
performance

To give students
further fluency
practice
• When we make a lesson plan, we need to be sure about the learning rationale (or reasons)
for the plan, to ask ourselves how the procedures will help to achieve our main aims and to
make sure there are strong connections between the different stages.
• We also need to build in variety, i.e. how we can use different activity types, language skills
and interaction patterns. Learners of all ages need variety, but this is especially important
for younger learners, who need frequent changes of activity.
• A lesson plan can include stages which we can leave out if necessary. We can also include
some different possibilities in a lesson plan, e.g. activities for differentiation or an extra
activity to use if learners take less time than expected to complete a task, or if we are not
sure how well parts of the plan will work.
• It’s a good idea to keep lesson plans as simple as possible, so notes are better than full
sentences, and there’s no need to describe every step in great detail. However, we may
want to write down some important things in a complete form – for example, prompts for
drilling, questions to check learners’ understanding, instructions, etc.
• A lesson plan should be clear and easy to read during the lesson. Different colors, boxes,
underlining, etc. are useful. It is often helpful to include drawings of the way the board will
look at different stages.
• A lesson plan can be divided into two parts. These are called background and procedure,
and you can see this division in the lesson plan. The components in the background come
from thinking carefully about who our students are, what they need and what our aims are.
The answers to these questions provide a context that helps us to write the procedure part
of the plan.