3631. Meaningful Activities in the Language Lesson: Some Try

 One example of a lesson plan for the second or foreign language classroom? Ok, let’s go with it, for a lesson plan or part of it, by combining the four language skills, which are listening, speaking, reading, and writing. 

Let me see. Ok, we have a text, one for our dear students, adequate to their English level – that language is the target one. 

First I provoke my students’ attention by asking them, kind of, Now, do you know how we say such and such things in English? And I give them, one by one, sentences in Spanish for them to try hard to translate into L2 – English. 

Then, I hand out some photocopies of the text or I send it via the Internet, to their laptops or iPads. 

Then, they have some minutes, say, ten or fifteen, to read the text silently. While they’re doing so I can contemplate how they work – often it’s awesome, and I can circulate to solve doubts. 

Then I read the text out for them to grasp word and sentence pronunciation. 

Then, they read aloud, by calling on individual students, and when each one finishes, I correct a few mistakes and errors. 

After they have worked on the text for rather long, I can tell them, Now turn your sheets over, and I ask them how they say such and such sentences in L2. So nice. 

After that I can tell them to choose five new words for them and write five sentences with those terms. 

Next, I’ll have such and such students to read out their sentences, or even I could have them write down a summary of the text. 

In between I could exploit some vocab from the text, by having the students define such and such words in English, also by me their teacher, in order to teach them examples of how to define words in L2, and also to mold the way of saying a word meaning. 

Even I could do, and they like it, the following activity: Define this word by using this or that other word. 

It’s kind of having the students engaged with significant and meaningful exercises, ones where they can see they are using the target language in a clever way, and they can see they are progressing and doing REALLY useful stuff. 

And do not forget to set some homework about that: if they see to all this at home for a second time, they will be actually learning the language: grammar and lexis. Come on, you can do it, even better than what I said here on this post. Have a nice day.