Hello ExamSeekers,

Last month, I started a series of posts about lesson planning, but I had a few busy days, which impeded me from continuing. So today, I’m gonna wrap it up.

Planning a lesson is one of the most important aspects of a lesson. You need to know what you are going to teach and how you are going to teach it before you actually do it. That’s why I say it’s one of the essential things to be doing before you actually perform in class. As a CELTA learner, you need to know that this is the beginning of it all, that’s why I decided to show how Productive and Receptive Skills Lessons are planned and developed in a CELTA course.

As I mentioned above, I’m going to finish the summary of the types of lessons and stages, I’m not going into deep. It’s just a general idea for you who are starting in this quest and want to know how you develop the steps. If you want some more information about each and every type of lesson and stage, message me, and I’ll be glad to help with a focused post about it.

So far, I wrote an overview of the steps you have to follow: a Parts of a Lesson Plan: What are the steps? [Part 1], then I posted a text about Receptive Skills Lessons [Part 2], which is a lesson planned focused on Listening and Reading. I wrote a text on Language Lessons [Part 3], and my last text was on Writing Lessons [Part 4].

Today, I’m going to go over a Speaking Lesson, which is also a Productive Skill Lesson.

Different from the other skills, a speaking lesson requires lots of steps, and here they are:

Warm-up / Lead-in – These have been mentioned for a while now. Keep in mind that you are focusing your lessons on speaking, so try to give your students something to move their bodies, okay? It is interesting to make them use all their body during a lesson – even though it is focused on a specific skill later on.

Read/listen for ideas OR pre-communicative task – your students are going to communicate something, this is the aim of the lesson, so you need a model from which they are going to “copy”. I wouldn’t say it is a copy, because they are not going to use the exact words, but they need to know what they are going to talk about and how to talk about it. So you need to provide them with a text or a recording/video, which will grant them a model. So it is a “pre-communicate task”, only after this step they are going to actually communicate.

Practice / Preparation for writing tasks – some teachers divide this stage depending on the amount of time they have. Well, after having students know the kind of language they are expected to use, they have to practice this language. You might give them a written activity where they are supposed to match the meaning to the word you taught them, or you might ask them to make lists of the language they are going to use. At this point, they have to practice the language you clarified in the step before, you can choose the way to do that.

Speaking task – here is when the speaking usually takes place. Teachers give their students a topic/question and plenty of time for them to use their ideas, and the language studied and speak in pairs or groups. Keep in mind that everything you’ve done before was preparing for THIS stage, which means that the most substantial part of your lesson must take place here. If you have a 60 min lesson, 30 minutes should be speaking, okay?

Feedback – After finishing the step before, you are going to give some feedback to your students. Maybe they misused the language, so you have to clarify them a bit more, perhaps they used wrong grammar structures you feen the need to correct, or maybe they were perfect, and you want to compliment them and highlight interesting ideas.

Reformulation – After feedback, if time aloud, you can give some time for your students to reformulate what they said before. So they had some mistakes, you pointed them out, it’s time for them to try and correct them in another speaking task. You can provide another question/topic, or you can switch pairs to have more conversation on the same idea. You can even make them report to the other groups what they talked previously but adding their point of view on what that former partner had said.

So this is how a Speaking Lesson should flow. I must reinforce the idea that this s a speaking lesson, so the main goal is to have your students speaking!!!

Well, I hope I have cleared some questions about the steps of Speaking Lessons. But if you still have questions about the steps given today, make sure to comment in the comment session below. And don’t forget to follow the blog at:

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Have a great weekend,
Patricia Moura