Hello ExamSeekers,
The past few Fridays, I’ve been posting about Lesson Plan. As I told you in the previous post, there was a long post about Lesson Planning here at the blog, but I decided to untangle it and give it more details and more explanations, that’s why I divided into 3 parts so far: Parts of a Lesson Plan: What are the steps? [Part 1], Parts of a Lesson Plan: Receptive Skills [Part 2] and Parts of a Lesson Plan: Language Lesson [Part 3]. Don’t worry, there will be more parts, I still have to talk about how to plan a Speaking and a Writing lesson.
First, let’s try and understand what a Language Lesson is:
When we think about Language Lesson, we are thinking about lessons focused on teaching aspects of the language like Grammar, Vocabulary, Functions, Phonology. For these topics, it is quite common to come across what we know as PPP – Presentation, Practice, Production.
I am going to talk more about the PPP Framework later on, but just for you to grasp its main idea, it is a type of lesson framework focused on the tools. We use the PPP to present the aspects of the language we use, as I mentioned before: Grammar, Vocabulary, Functions, Phonology…
In the PPP Framework for these Language Lessons, these are the steps:
Warm-up / Lead-in – As I have already mentioned, they are pre-requisites for any type of lesson, since you are to engage and connect your students to the lesson. Click here to get to know a little bit more about them.
Presentation – the grammar topic, the vocabulary, the function, or the phonological aspect is presented here, which means that you familiarize your students with the structures. There are several ways of doing that but, in CELTA, you will end up being familiar – perhaps quite close to – what is called MPF – meaning, pronunciation, and form. This sequence is only one of the strategies to introduce grammar, for instance. You presented the meaning and check understanding, then you work on pronunciation, so that students know how to pronounce it correctly, only then you write its form (affirmative, negative, interrogative, for instance).
Practice – in this stage, you have students practice what you presented on the step above – this is also known as controlled practice since students need to use the target language without other options, to practice what they are learning at this moment. If you feel the need to, you can divide this stage into two or three tasks depending on the duration of your lesson and the difficulty of the topic.
Production – this is the last step. Here you allow your students to personalize and communicate with each other – this stage is also called freer practice since the aim is not necessarily to have students use the target language, but to focus on the communication and getting the message across. You can have them do some written or spoken exercises. You can also allow them to exchange with other students what they know or open up as a class discussion, having them report their peer’s answers, for example.
The PPP (Presentation Practice Production) is the most common framework for a Language Lesson, especially in a CELTA lesson. There are, however, other frameworks like TTT (Test Teach Test), TBL (Task-Based Learning), Dogme, and others, which I’ll be commenting later on.
For now, If you still have questions about Language Lessons in a PPP Framework, please comment in the comment session below, and I’ll help you out.
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Have a great weekend,
Patricia Moura