OUTLINE

October 7, 2011
Lesson plan Why do we need lesson plans? How detailed should a lesson plans be? How to write objectives Acceptable wording & unacceptable points

Lesson Plans
Lesson plan is a proposal for action. Some teachers allow the coursebook to do the lesson

planning for them; they take a lesson/unit and teach it as it is offered in the book. Some teachers scribble a few notes down in folders or notebooks. Some prepare detailed description of what to do, so that someone else may take the plan and teach it.

Why do we need lesson plans?

New tachers need maps to help them through the

landscape: confidence For teachers in training, it is a good idea to try to follow the plan: justification

How detailed should a lesson plan be?

The lesson plan should include the following: Aims and Objectives Class Profile Material Context of Teaching Students Background Knowledge Skill/ Language Focus Potential problems and possible solutions Procedure (+ Stages, Timing, Interaction Patterns, Aids)

Rules
Objectives should be
Specific
Show cognitive process (not an activity) Student-centered

Observable
Address a change in students

ABCD of Objective Writing

Audience

Behavior
Condition Degree

Your learners What you expect the students to perform? Use

action verbs to describe an overt, observable behavior.

Under what circumstances and restrictions? How much will be accomplished?

By the end of the lesson, the students will have identified the advantages and disadvantages of living in a city after reading the text on city life.
Audience- your learners
Behavior - what you expect the students to perform Condition- under what circumstances and restrictions Degree- how much will be accomplished

By the end of the lesson, the students will have identified the advantages and disadvantages of living in a city after reading the text on city life.
(Audience) the students (Behavior) identify (Condition)
by the end of the lesson, after reading the text on city life

(Degree) the advantages and disadvantages of living in a city.

Acceptable Objectives with their ABCD

By the end of the lesson, students will be able to

exemplify at least 5 vocabulary items related to environmental pollution using their own words.
Within 20-minute group work, the students will

able to discuss the health problems of underdeveloped countries.

Given the article "Criminals Everywhere", the

students will have supported their ideas to reduce the crime rate in big cities.

Problematic Objectives
Students will understand the meaning of the words.
Students will be able to pick out a topic to discuss in class. The instructor will explain the effects of fossilization in learners'

language.

Given a list of sentences, the students will underline the adjectives.

Students will read the text twice/write a paragraph

Students will learn new vocabulary items.

Students will improve their pronunciation skills.

Goals
In bullet form, explain the general pedagogical goals

and aims (what you hope to accomplish as a teacher) in this lesson.

Ladder Analogy: Objectives vs. Goals

Examples: S will develop phonological awareness of the th sound. S will be familiarized with greeting expressions S will increase their familiarity with conventions of telephone conversations. Students will understand the usage of present perfect tense.

TEACHING READING

IMPORTANT CONCEPTS
TO KNOW BEFORE ONE STARTS TEACHING READING

EXTENSIVE READING

The teacher encourages the students to choose for themselves what they read for pleasure and general language improvement outside the class. The students should read materials on the topics they are interested in and materials appropriate for their level. Original fiction and non-fiction books, simplified works of literature, staged books, magazines can all be used. In order to encourage extensive reading we can build up a library for suitable books, provide them extensive reading tasks and encourage them report back on the reading in different ways.

INTENSIVE READING

It is a classroom oriented activity to have students focus on the semantic and linguistic details. In order to encourage students to read enthusiastically in class, teachers need to create interest in the topic and tasks. Teachers need to tell students the reading purpose, the instructions and time allocated. While the students are reading, the teachers may observe their progress but should not interrupt. When the teachers ask students to give answers, they should always ask them to say where in the text they found the relevant information. The teachers should focus on strategies to deal with the unknown vocabulary items.

BOTTOM-UP PROCESSING

Readers must recognize the linguistic signals (letters, syllables, words, phrases, discourse markers) This data-driven processing requires a sophisticated knowledge of the language. From the data, the reader selects the meaningful signal.

TOP-DOWN PROCESSING

Readers must refer to their own intelligence and experience to predict probable meaning and to understand a text.
This conceptually-driven processing requires readers to infer meaning. Both are important for interactive reading.

SCHEMA OR BACKGROUND KNOWLEDGE

The readers bring information, knowledge, emotion, memories, experience and culture to the printed text. Content schemata: what we know about people, the world, culture and the universe as background knowledge

SCHEMA OR BACKGROUND KNOWLEDGE

Formal schemata: what we know about the discourse structure as background knowledge.
knowledge of language and linguistic conventions, containing knowledge of how texts are structured and what the key characteristics of a particular genre of writing are (Alderson, 2000; Carrell, 1987; Carrell & Eisterhold, 1983) texts with familiar rhetorical organization should be easier to read and comprehend than texts with unfamiliar rhetorical organization (Carrell, 1987:464 revised in Etern and Razi, 2009).

INTEREST AND CULTURE

The love of reading has propelled learners to successful acquisition of reading skills. The autonomy and self-esteem gained through reading strategies has been shown to be a powerful motivator.
Culture plays an important role in motivating and rewarding people for literacy.

TEACHING VOCABULARY
Pre-teaching some of the vocabulary items from the text help reading comprehension for top-down processing. Pre-teaching vocabulary helps students (i)understand the text and (ii)learn the items

Focusing on some of the vocabulary items after reading the text provides a detailed analysis of the text through bottom-up processing.

HOW TO TEACH VOCAB?

HOW NOT TO TEACH VOCAB!

LEARNING GREEK

READ AND
. . .

GUESSING VOCABULARY

It helps readers develop strategies to do not only intensive but also extensive reading.

contextual clues parts of the word world knowledge cognates

ORAL READING (READING ALOUD) PROS & CONS?

Oral reading helps students correspond between spoken and written English in beginner levels. It can serve as a pronunciation check activity and add some extra student participation for short reading segments in the beginner and intermediate levels It is not an authentic activity and while one student is reading, the others may easily lose attention.

SILENT READING

Silent reading allows readers interact with the text themselves. Silent reading allows students to read at their own rate and to identify more than one word at a time.

The schemata and background knowledge, and affective domain help the reader interact with the text.
Sustained silent reading develops a fluency in reading.

AUTHENTIC TEXTS

Texts that are devised in the real world. They are genuine and not prepared for teaching purposes. They can be simple or difficult.

Three things should be kept in mind while choosing a text: Suitability

Engaging, enjoyable, challenging, & appropriate

Facilitating the achievement of certain language goals Appropriate lexical and structural difficulty

Exploitability

Readability

SIMPLIFIED TEXTS (SEMI-AUTHENTIC TEXTS)

They are formed through the simplification of an existing reading material. If the simplification must be done, it is important to preserve the natural redundancy, humor, wit and other features. The simplification may be useful to use a text with early proficiency levels.

LITERAL MEANING

This is the surface meaning of the reading text.

IMPLIED MEANING

This has to be derived from processing pragmatic information through sophisticated top-down processing.

STRATEGIES FOR READING

Identifying the purpose in reading:
Whenever you are teaching a reading technique, make sure your students know their purpose in reading something.

Skimming the text for the main ideas:

Skimming consists of quickly running ones eyes across a whole text for its gist. It helps the readers predict the purpose of the passage, the main idea, the message, supporting ideas.

Scanning the text for specific information:

It is searching for particular piece of information in a text such as names, dates, definition of a key concept, a list etc. without reading through the whole text.

Using semantic mapping and clusters:

Grouping the ideas into meaningful units and showing the relations among those help the readers to have a better picture of the text and ease comprehension while dealing with long texts and/or complicated series of events.

PRINCIPLES FOR READING

The specific instruction in reading skills: It is not possible to absorb Reading skills only through extensive reading opportunities. The teachers also should focus on the reading skills in in-class activities. Using intrinsically motivating techniques: Teachers should choose reading materials that are interesting and relevant for their needs and goals of language learning to be used in class and allow the students to select the material they like to read outside the class.

SQ3R: This is an effective procedure of reaching a text: Survey- question - read - recite and review
Check students comprehension: It is important to assess the development of students reading skills through some responses: doing , choosing from alternatives, transferring, answering questions, condensing, extending, duplicating, modeling and conversing

THE STAGES OF A READING LESSON

A. Pre-reading

Predicting Activating schemata Previewing a text (Title, author, source, layout) Skimming Scanning Pre-teaching Vocabulary B. While- Reading Reading for a purpose Reading for details of the text Reading to identify the cause-effect relations, to categorize ideas, to compare-contrast C. Post-Reading Identifying the authors purpose and style Examining the language (grammar or vocabulary) A follow-up writing or speaking exercise

QUESTIONS?
AGENDA FOR NEXT WEEK
TEACHER DEMONSTRATIONS