5-1 Lesson Planning

• General stages in ESL lessons

• Planning a lesson for an ESL class

1. Objective

Every lesson in ESL classes should have a clear objective; whether it is a skill related to reading, writing, listening and speaking, or a target language, including vocabulary or grammar points, this objective should be clear in the teacher's mind, and should eventually become as clear to the students, as well.

2. Warm-Ups and Tune-Ins

Reseach shows that students learn best when their curiosity and creativity are piqued, and especially when their past experience with a subject, referred to as background schemata, is activated.  Hence, a good language lesson should begin with a warm-up or tune-in activity.  These activities are usually fun and collaborative, and in the case of tune-ins, should hint at or remind students of their experience with the objective of the lesson.

3. Scaffolding and Pre-teaching  

In order to set students up for success with any input reading or listening materials your lesson may include, its often necessary to organize an activity that helps introduce students to new concepts or lexis they may encounter.  This will help ease the cognitive load of the input material, and enable students to focus on the intended objective of the lesson.

4. Activity

The heart of the lesson should consist of an activity or activities designed to highlight the familiarization and use of the lesson's skills or target language objective.  These activities can follow the stages of a PPP lesson plan, from presentation to practice and production, or they can hew more closely to experiential/task-based approaches or activities in which content and language learning are integrated (CLIL).   

5. Feedback

This portion of the lesson should allow for small group or planary feedback, giving both teacher and students the opportunity to evaluate the degree to which the activity has facilitated the learning of the objective.