As FLE students, we did not think much about what unit to choose from the national

curriculum, since we already had set our eyes upon high school grade English lesson. It only
felt natural for us to design our project upon this lesson that we found convenient and felt
familiar with, allowing us to focus on other aspects of project without worrying about the
genuineness of its subject content.

While planning our unit and lesson plans, we have spent a considerable amount of
time discussing the background of our learners, since the student mindset and education
system in our country has changed and is still changing dynamically, preventing us from
taking a quick, direct approach at the “Analyzing Learners” step. However, we have deduced
that the problems of today’s high school English students are probably similar to our past
experiences, if not same. Therefore, we took our past selves as example models when
analyzing our high school students as learners, leading us to the conclusion that their biggest
problem is how English was an uninteresting subject for them, causing them to ignore it for
most of the school life until high school.

Although we used the national curriculum learning outcomes and objectives as a base,
we did not forget to put our own personal input while shaping the learning outcomes and
objectives based on our own understanding of education, especially teaching English to high
school students. We also gave much thought into the question of “What kind of a student
should we consider as one that learnt our subject to the full extent?” and based our learning
outcomes on the answer.

We thought that six hours would be more than enough, but still not a wasteful time
allocation in our classes since speaking practice is an essential part of English learning, which
takes time. So, most of the six hours would be spent in Speaking activities where students
could even take the initiative, creating a better learning environment for them and their peers,
where students can be more of an overseer.

We have decided that a student who is going to take this lesson should have at least
middle-school level English skills, so they can express themselves better without their English
skill being a bottleneck, and a good understanding of time and frequency, since these fields
were involved with our unit the most.

We have selected and made flexible use of all technical materials that we were
assigned to use. While we suffered some problems with Weebly due to internet shortages
(heavy rain) and Weebly crashing when refreshing the page during an on-going edit, other
tools did not cause any trouble that hindered us in terms of time and resources.

Our instructional methods and activities are not based strictly on existing, known
approaches. However, we are still deeply inspired by them, and focused on a mix of
humanistic and pragmatic approaches. A heavy focus on speaking and group discussion was
more humanistic, like Communicative Approach from FLE, while quizzes and handouts were
following the traditional, written way of measurement and evaluation of performance. We also
supported this style of measurement and evaluation with speaking-based evaluations such as
teacher observations on student’s speaking activities and peer-feedback on these, which would
be essential in evaluating the student’s speaking and listening skills in a realistic way.

We have used our instructional methods, media, and materials in a supportive way
most of the time, as we only used them to reinforce teacher’s direct actions, rather than make
students interact with the material only while teacher only oversees them. We had a few
exceptional instances of material being the main focus, though.

For learner participation, we planned using group discussion and work as

encouragement and guarantee for all students to participate in the lesson actively, as well as
making our lesson have a more meaningful context and a natural atmosphere.