2. LESSON PLANNING

LESSON PLANNING – THE BASICS

Most JHSs have 3-6 lessons a week for each class/grade. ALTs usually team teach one of the three lessons with the JTE, but it may be more depending on the size of the school.

For the purpose of the following sections, we will assume that you, the ALT, are planning the lesson fully by yourself, rather than half and half with the JTE. In order to actively discuss ideas with your JTE, it’s better for you to have a thorough understanding of what you should be looking to get out of your lessons.

PRINCIPLES OF THE LESSON PLAN

When it comes to lesson planning, there are a few basic principles that you should try to remember for all your classes.

Each lesson should:

• Have clearly defined Target Language (TL) (See SWBAT in previous section);
• Include review;
• Include a number of fun activities that reinforce the TL;
• Start with controlled activities and move towards less controlled activities that can evaluate how well students have learned the TL;
• Use language which is beneficial and appropriate for the students;
• Have a Teacher-Student talk time ratio of around 30-70;
• Make appropriate use of the JTE;
• Be run in English;

These are some of the main principles, and depending on the lesson and the teacher, a good lesson will follow some, if not all, of these. Looking at the ‘FAB’ principle mentioned earlier, you can see how most of the principles above are covered by that simple idea. When planning your lesson, be sure to consider each of these points, and after your lesson, be sure to use all of the points above to help evaluate your lesson plan.

CHOOSING THE TARGET: IT ALL STARTS HERE!

Lesson planning starts from the target. If you don’t know where you want the lesson (and hence your students) to end up, it will be very difficult to get them there. One of the easiest ways to come up with the target is to check with the JTE on what they have been teaching. JTEs must follow the textbook: each school’s exams are usually based on the work that they have covered in that textbook, even down to rote memorizing entire passages and conversations. A good idea is to take the ideas that are covered in the book and turn them into a more conversation based lesson. After finding out where the JTE is in the textbook and seeing what kind of targets they have been covering, you can then choose what you feel to be the most appropriate target.

One point to note here, if each unit is divided into three or more lessons, it’s best for you to be teaching towards the middle and/or end. The Japanese teacher will generally explain grammar ideas and new vocabulary to the students in Japanese first. This allows more students to be able to understand what’s going on. Some targets open themselves more easily for you being able to introduce them, but if the students already have an idea of the target grammar/vocabulary before you begin your class, they will have a much better chance of understanding what you want them to do. And again, there are the principles of understanding, confidence and motivation.

Some teachers I’ve known have tried to introduce and explain grammar to their students purely in English, however, it sometimes ended in the explanation taking a full lesson with only half the students understanding what was going on. Two simple words in Japanese on the other hand could have explained it in two seconds. There are arguments for not using any Japanese in the class, but this is a debate for a different time.

CLASSROOM ACTIVITIES

Now you have the Lesson target, you can start thinking more about what you are going to have in your lesson. Most lessons end up being a series of games and activities that focus on using the target language.

Examples of actual games and activities that you can use are listed in detail in the Games and Activities handbook handed out in training, but to give you an idea of the types of activity available, on the next page is a short list.

All of these games and activities can be modified to help you make fun and fulfilling lessons. You’ll find that some may offer themselves more towards fun; some towards learning and understanding; some will lend themselves to the all important internalization of the target language.

Always remember that the target is the most important thing. Use the games and activities to fit the target, don’t try and force the target to fit the activity/game that you want to use. This can often create a dependence on the activities that you are using and stifle creativity.

BE CREATIVE!

All the activities here can be adapted and used in your team teaching lessons, but are of course just basic ideas, and as teachers, you should adapt and be creative and come up with your own ideas as time goes on.

CLASSROOM ACTIVITIES

Warm-ups: Short and simple activities used at the beginning or end of the lesson in order to heighten students’ motivation and focus their interest and attention on English.

• Reviewing: Incredibly important! Students review previously taught grammar, vocabulary, or target language.
• Total physical response (TPR): Students use both speaking and physical activity with the topic, grammar, or target language.
• Brainstorming: Develop creative and recall skills by generating ideas and language around a given topic.
• Pair work: Working in pairs maximizes students’ speaking time and helps build confidence with the target language.
• Group work: Increases talking time and allows students to be matched to similar interests and ability levels, or allow a mix of levels
• Information Gap: Usually a pair-type activity, students practice the target language by exchanging information to help the other fill in the information they have missing.
• Communicative Games: Very general, but basically games that require communication that are tended towards the target language or topic focus.
• Dialogue: Use repetition of a dialogue to create familiarity with the target language.
• Quizzes: Useful in review, warm-ups, end of term teamwork games. Students are tested on previously taught grammar, vocab, and target language.
• Skits: JTE and ALT perform a skit in front of the class to show natural use of language and present the target. Can be accompanied by a CLOZE activity.
• Cloze: A ‘fill in the gaps’ type activity, often done while listening to a dialogue.
• Music: Practice listening/pronunciation/rhythm by listening/singing a song.
• Teamwork: Involves a competitive element to increase motivation and participation and students can learn from each other.
• Role-play: Useful in production activities. Students adopt roles from real-life situations in order to use the language more functionally.
• Mime: The use of gestures and body language to aid communication.
• Speeches: Students create and present a speech. (Slightly higher-level activity and needs motivated and confident students.)
• Presentation: Develops organization, teamwork, preparation skills. Preparation time increases confidence and allows for greater accuracy.
• Interviewing: Question and answer type activities, usually done in pairs or groups.
• Cultural Awareness: Any activity that highlights cultural or cross-cultural topics. Customs or language.

Keep it Dynamic

The list mainly includes the types of activity available to you. The actual activities you choose will usually fall, in some form or another, into one or more of these categories. An example might be a game of Bingo. This can be done as a Group Work game, however if you do it with vocabulary only and use gestures to get the students to guess the words, then you are adding an element of Mime. You could elicit the vocabulary by means of a series of questions and answers making the activity bend towards information gap.

As you can see, the choices are endless and the different ways that you can adapt each game or activity you do will help to keep them fresh and interesting. Students need variety to hold their attention, especially younger learners.

Consistency in rules and basic format will help understanding, but changes in the style and layout can rejuvenate the most overused of games.

TEACHING TECHNIQUES

Another way to adapt your games and activities is by employing a variety of different teaching techniques. How will you introduce the game to the students? How will you illustrate/model the rules of the game to the students?

• Eliciting: The teacher draws the language/vocabulary from the students.
• Drilling: Students repeat the target language or sentence pattern provided by the teacher thus practicing fluency, rhythm, intonation, and word stress. This is often an important tool in the team teaching classroom.
• Demonstrating/Modeling: Teacher demonstrates the activity to be performed, either with the JTE or with student.
• (Language) Modeling: In this case the teacher is clearly presenting the target language to the students.
• Dramatizing: The teacher uses gestures, body language, tone of voice, and actions or interactions in order to illustrate the meaning.
• Monitoring: Monitor students throughout the lesson to check for grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, and intonation errors. Ensure that you are monitoring the whole class and paying equal attention to all students.
• Checking: After presenting new language, or introducing a new activity, check that the students understand the meaning of the language, or what they have to do in the activity.
• Correcting: As part of monitoring, the teacher corrects mistakes made by the student. Try not to single out students, instead focus on group correction.
• Instructing: As mentioned before, develop your classroom language in order to help you instruct the class using language and gestures that are familiar to them. This again aids motivation.
• Conceptualizing: Use realistic situations, pictures, realia, music, etc in order to put across the meaning and usage of language and to help them associate the language with an image or context.
• Personalizing: Use the students’ experiences and life to make the language more relevant to them and hence easier to remember.
• Praising: Always respond positively to the students’ efforts in order to create a fun and motivated learning environment.
• Organizing: Make sure the students and teachers know exactly what they are doing and when.
• Regulating: Always use language, speed, vocabulary, etc, that is within the students’ level.

NOW YOU HAVE THE TARGET, ACTIVITIES AND TECHNIQUES, HOW DO YOU PUT EVERYTHING TOGETHER INTO A LESSON?

THE REGULAR JTE LESSON VS. THE TEAM TEACHING LESSON

For the Team Teaching lesson, after deciding the target, you can use the book to get some ideas, but then you can move away from the text and make your own communicative lesson based on the language target you have decided on.

With the language target decided, how do we order activities into a lesson plan?

THE LESSON PLAN – A BREAKDOWN

• • First, you need to get your students back into thinking in English.
  • Then you need to put them on the wavelength of the target you will teach that lesson.
  • Next, you need to get them to practice the new language.
  • Finally, students need to be able to test their ability to produce the target language themselves.
  • In the end, there should be a cool down to end the lesson.

Using These Ideas In Your Lesson Plan.

START THE CLASS – LET STUDENTS KNOW IT’S THEIR ENGLISH LESSON

Let the students know that this is their English class. This could be as simple as doing your greetings in English and taking the attendance. You could also have a quick fire Q&A session asking about the weather, day, date, etc. consistency is important as we need to put the students back into ‘English class’ mode.

MOTIVATE THE STUDENTS. GET THEM READY TO LEARN

Having a simple review game or short but dynamic vocabulary exercise gets the students’ minds prepared and motivated to study English. A mistake made at this point would be just to focus on getting the students energized. Energized is good, but are they energized to study or to play games. We still want students to study and be prepared to work hard to understand and process English. Also, make sure this activity is related to the day’s lesson target. All too often, warm up games can be a little unrelated. This leads to difficult transitions between activities.

ACTIVATE THE LESSON’S TARGET LANGUAGE

Using some of the vocabulary used in the previous activity, now it’s time to ‘activate’ the target language for the day’s lesson. Activating the language doesn’t mean giving the students the target in their first language then telling them what it is in English. To activate language means building up an image of on the particular target language in the students’ minds, hopefully independent of their first language. A much stronger connection can be made and much better fluency achieved if students have an association of English separate to their first language. Activation can be as simple of using flashcards and gestures to elicit and drill the target language.

REINFORCE THE TARGET LANGUAGE

Once the students understand the concepts, the ideas need to be reinforced with practice activities. Practice activities vary from structured and assisted to unstructured a freer. A structured example might be filling in gaps with the correct verb structure. Freer practice could be using the target language to express your own ideas and experiences.

TEST THE STUDENTS’ ABILITY TO USE THE TARGET LANGUAGE

At the end of the lesson, it is important to test whether students have been able to acquire the language of the lesson, or at least and good understanding of it. Direct testing could come in the form of a quiz, where indirect testing could be through interviews and role plays. In each case you can make your lesson SMARTER by then Evaluating the students and Reinforcing as required.

Of course, there is no magic formula to writing a lesson. There are many different things that you have to consider before starting, these include…

• Class age (atmosphere);
• Class ability (and range of ability);
• Number of students in the class;
• Class layout (how are they seated);
• Language target;
• Class likes and dislikes;
• Etc…

Over-thinking each of these points, however, can be overwhelming, but there are some basic principles to follow that will help you to plan great lessons that the students will be able to enjoy, understand and learn from!

CREATING SYSTEMS

We have talked about focusing targets and keeping lessons fun and being flexible. Whilst trying to keep your class varied and fun, you should also try to create some systems: a common thread to your lessons which will help students follow what you are doing.

EXAMPLES OF THIS INCLUDE:

Giving instructions in a similar way each time and following certain patterns as to how you present new grammar, vocabulary etc will help students feel more comfortable.
Using repetition of certain themes and ideas you’ll find students quickly being able to understand you more easily. If you mix it up too much you will confuse a lot of the students, especially the lower ones. While a mixed approach may be helpful to higher students, you may find that you are leaving a lot of the lower students behind, creating a loss of motivation in your lessons – never a good thing!
Creating a system of gestures is invaluable! Most of the information that we present to each other in daily communication is done through gestures and body language. Having different gestures to tell students to move their desks, come to the board or start writing, for example, will allow all students to quickly understand what you want them to do. This is communication and if students can understand you they’ll be able to quickly react. Again this inspires confidence and confidence leads to motivation!

A LESSON TEMPLATE

Adding up all these parts and looking at the lesson plan more closely we have:

• • Start
  • Motivate
  • Activate
  • Reinforce
  • Test
  • (Cool down)

So now, let’s break down each section and look at it more closely.

START

Key Elements:

Start the lesson with both you and the JTE greeting the class and asking how everyone is. This will help students to remember that they are in an English class.

• You aren’t trying to challenge the students too much at the start of the lesson. Create a system and as time goes on you can expand on ideas, for example, “How are you?” becomes “How’s it going?”
• Expand the greeting by adding additional questions such as “How’s the weather today?” and “What’s the date today?” Be sure to have pre-taught these questions in a previous class though.
• In the greetings, only use language that the students know very well and feel comfortable using. Remember, comfort equals confidence which leads to motivation and attentive students!!

MOTIVATE

What are the key elements of this stage?

• Usually lasts between 5-10 minutes
• Focuses students’ attention on English
• Isn’t too challenging
• Easy to explain
• Incorporates language review
• Creates a motivated mood
• Is related to a recent lesson target or the target of the current lesson.

As with the ‘Start’, you aren’t really trying to challenge the students too much at this stage. If you are reviewing very recent targets, the students will feel more comfortable with the language than if you are reviewing language from 3 months previous.

Choosing an Activity

As stated previously, the Warm Up should have some relevance to the day’s target language. Your lesson should always flow effortlessly. If you do a great warm up about the weather and then run into a lesson on food without relating the targets, the students may get lost along the way: always a bad thing!

Remember that your lesson should flow. So if you current lesson is: SWBAT use “Do you like…?”

A warm up may first review the names of sports, perhaps using the previously learned “What is this?” You can then use gestures to elicit the names of a few sports, or perhaps use pictures. You could play a whole class activity using sports as the topic vocabulary. Again, this is a motivating warm up so you are not dwelling too much on the topic of sports, or really focusing on too much new vocabulary, you are just getting the students to start remembering some of the English that they have previously learned.

ACTIVATE

This is where the students get what may be their first exposure to the target language. If we stay with the SWBAT of “Do you like…?”, then after, for example, eliciting sports vocabulary from the students, you can then perhaps ask one of your higher-level students the target question using gestures, pictures, or tone/intonation to demonstrate the meaning. Imagine looking to the students with a picture of someone playing soccer, and use gestures such as thumbs up/down, and/or facial expressions to get them to understand the idea ‘Do you like soccer?’ In this way, you activate an image of the meaning of the language in the students’ minds.

One key to this stage is that you aren’t just giving the students the model sentence(s). First give them the chance to get it themselves.

If you ask the question to a higher student, they can then answer “Yes, I do.” or “No, I don’t.” A good student should be able to do this from their knowledge of previous targets, if not, help them out by a slow reveal of the answer. You can now use this as a model for other students to be able to answer the question.

Once the students have been exposed to the language in this way, you can then write it on the board.

After this, listening to and saying the target language will help them to internalize it more than only reading it straight from the board.

The Charms of Effective Drilling

With large groups of students, as you will be exposed to in JHS, HS, and elementary schools, it is then best to go into drilling of the target language. This is a very important step in these types of classes. Make sure that all students are speaking in a loud voice, and check that they are using correct pronunciation and intonation. Make sure that you practice all parts of the target language, positive and negative answers, and also add a few different examples of “Do you like ___?”

It’s worth taking a quick and closer look at drilling.

So, Why Is It Important?

In the next stage of the lesson, ‘Practice’, you are going to be setting your students an activity that allows them to, as you can guess by the name, ‘practice’ the target language. This may be done in pair/group work, as an individual exercise, or a mixture of these. Even with two teachers in the class, it’s still difficult to monitor all the students perfectly, so effective drilling gives the students plenty of opportunities to fine-tune their pronunciation skills and to ‘find their voice’.

If the students are given ample opportunity to vocalize the new language before going into the activity, they will have more confidence, and confidence leads to motivation, which leads to active learning!! (I may have said that before!) If students are starting the activity before feeling confident with the language, they’ll stop trying, be distracted from the activity, and need a lot of extra personal attention. In essence, effective classroom management will be the first casualty!

Mix up the drilling with ALT to Student Q&A, JTE to Student, and Student to student. In the beginning, be sure to give lots of modeling, but then slowly fade yourself out by using flashcards or gestures to elicit the sentence structures.

REINFORCE

For lower-level classes, this will take up the majority of the lesson.

What are the key points of this stage?

• It follows on from what has been drilled in the ‘Presentation’
• It should follow the lesson’s language target.
• It is controlled – too much freedom at this time would be difficult for many students.
• The language expands on that of the ‘Presentation’.
• It involves model speech patterns that allow communicative interactions between the students.
• Students are monitored for correct language usage.

The type of activities that are most commonly used here are pair/group work, and/or whole-class exercises, including information gap, cloze activity, communicative games, teamwork/competitive games, speeches, substitution exercises, etc.

For our example language target of “Do you like…?” we may have a pair work game where students just ask each other a list of questions and then tick their partner’s answer for ‘Yes, I do.’, or put an ‘X’ for ‘No, I don’t.’. It may be a group activity where you first put your own answers, then walk around the class and try to find someone with the same likes and dislikes as yourself. You could play a game where first you have to guess your partner’s answers and see how many you got correct by then asking them.

BE CREATIVE!

TEST

With the mixed level of abilities that you may come across in your school, it is again best to keep some degree of control at this stage.

The main points of this section include:

• Follows directly from the Practice.
• Students see and use the language in a more natural way.
• Language is still controlled; however students are given a little more freedom to get creative.
• Communicative competence is encouraged.
• Fluency takes over as a key element.
• Is timed to finish around 5 minutes before the lesson ends. (For the cool down and perhaps to pack away materials or return desks, etc.)

This section may sometimes heavily overlap with the ‘Practice’ stage or be dropped altogether, especially with lower level classes.

In this section you aren’t focusing as much on error correction as you are on fluency, speed and confidence.

Using our example lesson target, ‘Do you like…?’, your ‘Production’ may be to allow students to freely choose 1 animal, 1 person, 1 sport, 1 food, 1 place, 1 hobby (of course limiting the choice to topics to those the students have already covered in previous lessons and feel comfortable with) and let them interview their classmates.

COOL DOWN

If you have planned a master lesson, your students have by now had fun, learned or reinforced some language target, gained a little confidence and steadily come closer to realizing that English is in fact the greatest subject of all! Oh, and they should have about five minutes for some kind of cool down!

The importance of this time:

• Give students time to clear up after activities.
• Students have time to relax after working hard in their super fun English lesson.
• Students are all sitting in their seats when the bell goes so they have time to prepare for their next lesson.
• Students can feel like the lesson has ended.
• You have time to practice your good byes with the class and re-affirm the day’s target.

So after tidying up, get the students to sit down, then perhaps go over the target language on the board chorally a couple more times (it should now be super easy and the students will be able to see how much they have learned that class).

To finish, go into final Good-bye’s, which should mirror something like that which you did at the beginning of the lesson. Again expand and adapt the language as time goes on depending on different student levels.

Example Goodbye

ALT: That’s all for today.
ALT: Goodbye class.
Ss:     Goodbye …
JTE: Goodbye class.
Ss:     Goodbye …

To expand on this add, “See you next week.” Or, on Fridays, “Have a good weekend.” teaching the students the appropriate responses.

Download some example lesson plans :

1. Do you like?      (WORD)(PDF)
2. Passive Voice     (WORD)(PDF)