Jul 9, Best English Lesson Plans

Every teacher wants to know how to write the best English lesson plans so here are some simple tips for you.

What do the best English lesson plans need?

When I started teaching, I found this tough. The aim is the ‘why’ of the lesson and without it you can plan nothing. Start at the aim and work back. For example if your aim is to provide speaking practice in a particular situation then make sure you give your students the grammar, vocabulary and background information they need before they can talk to each other. Tell your students what the aim is, and then they will stay focused too. It is also good to recap the aim at the end of the lesson so the students leave knowing what they have achieved. Keep the lessons relevant to the class. There is no point doing a lesson based on politics for a class of elementary school age kids, and a lesson about the current teen star won’t be of much interest to most adults! Find subjects the class will be interested in and base your lessons around these. If possible, get your students to choose the subjects themselves. Make sure you vary your tasks so your students don’t get bored. Try and include different activities for students with different learning styles. For example, some visual tasks (try using picture activities), some physical tasks (try getting your students to act things or move round the class), some audio tasks (music is great if you use it in the right way), and some old-fashioned reading and writing tasks. Even adults start to lose interest after about 30 minutes so keep each stage short. I don’t mean you need to write two lesson plans, but it’s a good idea to have some extra activities you can use if something doesn’t work, or if students finish too soon. If you did a reading activity and they finished too early, get them write comprehension questions for a partner, or give them dictation on part of the text. Having extra activities prepared means you don’t panic if you finish early and gives students extra practice. Don’t become a teaching machine. Put something of your own personality into your lessons. Your students will appreciate this. If you like music, write a lesson plan around a particular song. If you are a keen sports person then use that to create fun games and activities. Your enthusiasm for the subject will be clear and your students will also be enthusiastic about learning. Humor is also important in lessons and can be used at any level. Warm up activities are essential. If you exercise then you need to warm up first so your body can get the full benefit of your training. It’s the same with mental training. If you give your students challenging work to do before they have tuned into English, it may be too difficult for them and they will lose motivation. A 5 minute word game or a quick conversation with a partner is all you need. Try and keep it relevant to your lesson to maximize learning.

There are lots of things to think about but these tips will help you write the best English lesson plans possible.

Jul 8, Vocabulary Lesson Plans

Having good vocabulary lesson plans is key to helping your students improve. Increasing vocabulary is important to learning a language, as anyone can communicate if they know enough words, even if their grammar isn’t great. If they don’t know the words they can’t do anything.
Well, here are some key points to help you. Students won’t remember random words so teach new vocabulary in groups. For example personality adjectives, weather words, clothing, words connected with travel, etc.
It is usually quite ineffective to simply let students try and work out meaning from context. But seeing or hearing words in context will help them remember. So for example you can pick out words from a reading text and get them to look them up in a dictionary and make their own sentences using these words.
If you see or hear a word once, will you remember it? It isn’t likely is it? Use the words more than once and present them in different ways. Students have different learning styles – some will remember from reading a word, others will remember from hearing it. Others will need to use it to remember the word. So try and give them plenty of opportunity to read or hear the words.
If the students use the word, producing it in their own sentences, they are much more likely to remember it. Let them use the new vocabulary in written texts, role plays or presentations. Make sure they use the new words and don’t stick to old, ‘safe’ words they know. It’s important to get them to make sentences that show they understand the meaning. For example if you’ve taught ‘stormy’, the sentence ‘It is stormy,’ does not show understanding. A sentence like, "We didn't go out because of the stormy weather," would probably be much better. Push the students to do the best they can and don’t let them get lazy.
That may not always be true but if you are teaching adjectives, it makes sense to teach them in pairs as students will be more likely to remember them that way.
Make it fun.  Vocabulary teaching is a great opportunity to get some games into the classroom. Many teachers resort to Hangman as a filler at the end of the lesson but it isn’t much fun, can be culturally insensitive, and doesn’t really help learning all that much. Pairs matching/memory games work well with vocabulary and there are a load of games you can make more interesting by setting up teams and letting them compete against each other. 
Don’t teach vocabulary in one lesson then forget it. Always have an activity in the next lesson to reinforce the learning.
Of course you can tell your students new words, but you may need to show them how to learn them. Let them see different techniques of organizing vocabulary notebooks – mind maps, lists, translations, sentences, etc, and encourage them to look up new words they encounter.

If you follow these tips when you are writing vocabulary lesson plans, then your lessons should become more effective and more enjoyable.