SMART ELT uses a systematic but highly flexible approach to lesson and curriculum planning that works perfectly for your EFL and junior high school English classes.
Having a teaching philosophy and approach to your lesson and curriculum planning is vitally important. It gives you a framework from which you can plan, implement and evaluate your lessons. It also provides a clearer direction for your course, meaning that both you and your students know where you are heading. This leads to more motivation as students are better able to understand and enjoy their language learning journey.
For once-a-week classes, having a system that students become familiar and comfortable with will help them engage more and will create a more effective environment for learning English. Totally mixing everything up week-to-week can be fun, but you can lose valuable time having to constantly explain everything from the beginning. In addition, you can lose the overall flow of the course. Of course, to keep things interesting, the teacher needs to break up the lessons with different activities, but having a core approach and teaching philosophy is important for building a coherent and well balanced curriculum/course.
The SMART Approach
Start the class – let students know it’s English time
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 quickfire 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 for English study
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 a 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.
For more information on S.M.A.R.T. teaching, check out the Smart ALT training:
There are example lessons plans that show how the methodology is used in a regular junior high school or beginner level English conversation class.
