Running head: LESSON PLANS AND RATIONALE

Lesson Plans and Rationale Stephen McClure LING 583 Curriculum and Materials Design for TESOL Professor Xuehua Xiang University of Illinois at Chicago April 30, 2012

LESSON PLANS AND RATIONALE Introduction Why write lessons plans? What are the benefits and uses of lesson plans in general? Lesson plans serve many purposes. The most obvious of these is as a road map or outline of the time period to be covered. A plan fosters good time management, helping to ensure that what is needed is covered, and that the class does not get sidetracked. A plan makes implicit ideas explicit, and provides a coherent framework to help the lesson make sense. A good plan also attempts to anticipate potential problems and suggest possible solutions, as well as ensuring that all equipment and materials are available. On a broader level, a lesson plan also provides clear objectives that are tied to the overall goals of the curriculum. And finally, last but not least, lesson plans serve as documentation of the lesson for later reflection, editing, re-use and collaboration among colleagues. This paper presents the rationale behind the design of two consecutive ESL lesson plans. The hypothetical context of the lessons is as follows. The course is an intermediate reading course in a typical university IEP program. The goals of the course are to build reading strategy skills and vocabulary, to prepare learners for the wide range of texts they will encounter at university. Students are required to purchase learner dictionaries and graded readers. The two

LESSON PLANS AND RATIONALE lesson plans and the materials used in them are included with this paper as separate documents. A complete, ordered list is given in the Appendix. In what follows, we will examine the two lesson plans from three perspectives. First, we will

discuss the general lesson content at a high level; second, we will examine the types of planned activities and exercises; and third, we will address the way the steps are sequenced. Content Given the overall goals of an IEP curriculum, writing courses are usually designed to expose learners to a variety of genres of text, and these lesson plans reflect such goals. There are two major reading topics, one an expository piece similar to a magazine article, the other a longer piece of fiction (which students prepare for and only just begin in the second lesson). Working with these texts, learners will focus on two learning objectives that support their reading ability: strategies and vocabulary (Brown, 2007, ch. 20). Thus three general aspects of the lessons --the types of readings, the focus on strategies, and the focus on vocabulary-- constitute specific objectives tied hierarchically to the higher-level goals of the course (Graves, 2000, pp. 76-77). Activity Types In discussing the kinds of things that are happening in the classroom, we will use the terminology cited by Graves

LESSON PLANS AND RATIONALE (2000, p. 157), namely the distinction between exercises and activities used in the Australian Language Levels guidelines. An exercise is a more structured and controlled way to help students focus on a particular aspect of language or communication, while an activity refers to a more open-ended

opportunity for students to produce communicatively purposeful language. It is important to achieve a balance of these two, and the two lesson plans attempt to do this. If we code the sections in the two plans with E, A, and T (teacher talk, e.g., grammar explanation), we see the following patterns. LP1: A-A-E-E-E-T-A-A, LP2: A-E-T-A-A-E-E-A-E, showing a relatively even balance between exercises and activities. Looking at the steps of the lesson plans another way, we find "warm-up" activities (used to begin each lesson and "get the juices flowing"), pre-reading steps, during-reading steps, and post-reading steps. This approach, suggested by Brown (2007, p. 375) has been shown to be very effective for teaching reading. In particular, there is quite a bit of evidence for the benefit of pre-reading schema activation (pp. 358-359). While the primary focus remains reading, Brown also stresses the importance of skills integration (p. 285). Note that several exercises and activities in both lessons require listening, speaking and writing, providing a balance of all four macroskills.

LESSON PLANS AND RATIONALE Sequencing With respect to the flow of the lessons, we will look at three aspects: (1) the overall organization, (2) transitions between lessons, and (3) the difficulty contour. Each lesson has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The opening activities are either interesting tidbits about English or fun little games that serve to loosen up the class. The middle part is the "meat" of the lesson, where new vocabulary is introduced and strategies are practiced. Saving some time at the end to wrap up allows the teacher to ask if there are any questions, and to assign and discuss the homework for the next class. Homework is the mechanism used to link two lessons, with the first exercise after the warm-up being a homework review. By "difficulty contour" we mean that as the lesson progresses, the exercises and activities gradually become more complex, less teacher-controlled, and more student-centered and interactive. This is in keeping with Doughty & Long's (2003) methodological principle of following learner syllabi, or patterning classroom work after learners' developmental processes. Note that the first lesson builds up to a roleplaying discussion activity, and the second (since it is beginning a new reading toward the middle) progresses to the point of some pair work on the new vocabulary.

LESSON PLANS AND RATIONALE Sources Most of the content of these lesson plans was adapted from the following sources. The warm-up activities are taken from Ur & Wright (1992). The Slow Food passage and exercises are adapted from Butler (2010). For the Sherlock Holmes reading, the pre-reading activities are adapted from a lesson observed at DePaul University's English Language Academy, and the text is excerpted from West (2007).

LESSON PLANS AND RATIONALE References Brown, H. D. (2007). Teaching by principles: An interactive approach to language pedagogy (3rd Ed.). White Plains, NY: Pearson Longman. Butler, L. (2010). New password 3: A reading and vocabulary text. White Plains, NY: Pearson Longman. Doughty, C. J. & Long, M. H. (2003). Optimal psycholinguistic environments for distance foreign language learning. Language Learning & Technology, 7(3), 50-80. Graves, K. (2000). Designing language courses: A guide for teachers. Boston, MA: Heinle.

Ur, P. & Wright, A. (1992). Five-minute activities: A resource book of short activities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. West, C. (2007). Sherlock Holmes short stories. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

LESSON PLANS AND RATIONALE Appendix: List of Included Materials

The following PDF documents are included with and referred to in this paper.

For Lesson Plan 1: Lesson Plan 1 Slow Food (reading passage)

Comprehension Check (comprehension check questions) Scanning Reading Cloze 1 Reading Cloze 2 (scanning questions) (homework) (homework)

For Lesson Plan 2: Lesson Plan 2 Pre-Reading Activity Vocabulary Matching Questions on Part 1 of The Speckled Band The Speckled Band, Part 1