Lesson Plan for English Learners - Term Paper Example

Certificate II in Spoken and Written English MODULE K: SWENEW211A Comprehending news and information texts Described your group of learners – identified their language level, their goals and the context The students are studying at MTC Australia, Banks town, in an adult TESOL general English; which is a social enterprise that has been in existence for over 20 years helping people find jobs, self-confidence, gain employment and training. There are 21 students in the class. The level of the learners is intermediate and above. One student has lower level than other students but he decided to stay on the class as he wants to stay with friends. Some of them have been living in Australia for more than 20 years, while others less than one year. The learners come from different backgrounds, cultures and beliefs. Most of the students were from Arabic background, ranging from the age of 20 to 63. The students plan to be a part from Australian community, some of the learners have University degree in their native language and they intend to continue with their studies after finishing this course. The learners study in a conducive environment and they are friends despite the fact that they are from diverse background. Topic for the Learning Outcome. The aim of the activity: Demonstrate understanding of the main information in articles, understanding of detailed information, and understanding of headline, discuss the information and answer the questions. The goals of this lesson are: Enable the students to learn new vocabularies relate to the topic. Learn how to use the possessive adjectives and pronoun to replace the noun. Enable students to learn the subject pronoun and the object pronoun. The learners will learn the present simple. Exercise 1: Using a pronoun. She doesn’t live in a city. He likes listening to music. He likes his job. He has a mobile phone. She speaks a foreign language. She has a dog. Using pronouns in a text. Using the possessive adjectives and pronoun to replace noun: 1: Keiko lives in New York because she finds it interesting. 2: Keiko’s husband doesn’t like living in New York because he wants to stay in the country. Exercise 2: 1: Subject pronoun come before the verb. She is Japanese. She lives in New York. He wants to leave. 2: Objective pronouns come after the verb. Walter takes them. Keiko likes it. She wants it. 3: The present sample. Wilson is Japanese. Keiko lives in New York. Walter takes the two children. Keiko likes New York. The learner in the first exercise will learn about the pronouns in general, they will try to use the personal pronoun in each sentence. In the second exercise, they will try to make this text more natural by rewrite the whole text again and change the nouns to pronoun if it necessary. Then they learn more in details about the subject pronoun and the object pronoun. The lesson is delivered through different skills. Baker (2000, p.63), states that there are sub-skills the teacher need to use in the reading activity, these sub-skills are: 1: Predicting; 2: Reading for the main ideas; 3: Reading for specific information The reading started by divided the lesson to different parts: First, “before reading activates’’, which presented by Baker (2000), it could be include any of the following: Brainstorming The teacher starts the lesson by providing vocabularies taken from the reading task in the board. It can also be, some ideas or information related to the reading, or sometimes pictures from the reading. These activities can help the students to understand the new terms then they can find these vocabularies in the reading. The teacher has to provide a glossary of words that could be problematic to the learners for example, collected, chemist, bought. Discussion: The learners can discuss the story or the reading and what they guess form the title or the headlines. The students may study the picture from the reading and try to make out what and who will be in the reading. Teacher may ask the students if they had a busy day yesterday, and write their response on the board by use the past tense for example, ‘’yesterday I had a very busy day ‘’ This activity can be done in pairs or in groups; it would help the learners to engage with the lesson. It could also improve the students’ language ability because they use their own experience (Harmer, 2007). Ask Questions: Firstly, the learners may answer questions rise by looking at the first sentence from the reading or the story. They can also think of questions they would like to answer by studying the pictures or the topic. This type of activity can help develop the learners’ questions formation skills. It can help the teacher to monitor the questions formation while the learners are involved in asking questions (Baker, 2000; p.64). Secondly, during the reading activities learners have to improve their skills in silent reading. Brown (2007) mentioned that silent reading techniques will not be easy to apply for the beginner level students as they still have a limited knowledge in vocabularies. But it can be apply for student with high levels as they have more numbers of vocabularies and grammatical patterns. Find the main ideas: Skimming: is one of the most important skills learners need to use when they deal with reading task. It consists of quick drive of sight across a whole reading. The reader by this skill can be able to guess the purpose of the article, the main information and ideas. Students can learn skimming skills by gave them a limited time for example 30 second to look over the whole reading and ask them about the information they find.( Brown,2007, p.366). Reading for specific information: Scanning: which is another important skill for learners; it is quickly searching for specific information or answers in the reading. For example, teacher can ask students for particular names, numbers or dates. Comprehension question The teacher may ask detailed questions related to the reading while the learners provide the answer or write it on the board. Then both the teacher and the learners can discuss the sentence grammar. This activity gives a chance for all students to respond either in pairs or in small groups. Learners may come up their own questions in groups and ask the other groups. For example, group one ask group two “did you play tennis last Sunday?’’(Baker, 2000). Understand the implied meaning of the words: Learners have different level of understand which include; literal and critical creative understanding. In literal understanding the teacher has to involve the students in locating information directly stated in the reading. In general, they answer questions such as what? Where? When? Who? . In comprehensive, teacher needs to encourage the students by ask him about their opinions and think about the possible explanations for the facts. Gap-filling exercises: The teacher can remove some nouns, verbs or adjectives from the text and ask the learners give the missing words from the context of the text. This type of activities give the students a wider scope about the grammar. Dealing with unknown vocabularies According to Brown (2007), the learners don’t need to understand the whole unknown words, the teacher needs to explain that understanding the topic in general is enough. Word analysis can help students to understand words meaning. They can use some of the following techniques: Look to prefixes ( re-,un-,inter-) , Analyse the semantic meaning of the words, analyse the grammatical context, Look to the suffixes of the words which could help to show the part of speech (-tion, -lly, -ist), Look to the root of the words. Integrated Skills Activity Dictogloss: The learner will start read the text as group, each group has to read part from the reading and tell the other groups the information that they found. Each group has to make a sentence that they remember from the other group. The ‘dictogloss’ is a procedure that help the students to reflect on their own output. It is used to teach the learners the grammatical structure of sentences. This type of activities should be done in groups to ensure the maximum effectiveness. The learner in this type of activity will use reading, listening and speaking skills. Instruction: The teacher will divide the class to pairs or groups, then he/ she will read the text to the learners at normal way and speed. The students have to listen, the first time without writing, when the teacher stops the learners can start taking notes. The teachers will read the text again in this time the students correcting their writing. Students then work in pairs or groups to prepare a summary of their sentences and the grammatical structure. Then the learners start to reconstruct some of the information they hear from their friends, this activity could take 15-30 minutes. Each group will write couple of sentence in the board, the whole class start to read and try to correct the grammar; they need be close to the original text. This process could be done by students themselves, which known as ‘self or other-correction’ (Brown, 2007). The teacher can also help them to make the sentence grammatically correct. This activity has a number of advantages, it encourages students to focus on the grammar of their writing, it also integrates the four language skills of reading, writing, speaking and listening. It encourages the learners to focus on the main points of the text and participate in their groups as it is part of the activities. Running Dictation: This activity requires a copy of a text to be suitable for the students’ level. The text should contain something students familiar with. The teachers divide the learners to pairs or group of three, with one student being the designated a ‘runner’, one will be the ‘writer’, and the other members of the group can help the ‘runner’. Pin up a number of copies of the chosen text on the walls, then tell the students the instruction of this game. When the game start the ‘runner’ from each group have to run to their sheet of paper, they have to memorise as much as they can from the text, and then they running back to the writer and dictating the text. The runner has to dictate the text only not write, they also need to go to the group table, for the activity to work. When the writer has finished the first sentence, runners of the group run to the text again. After all the sentences of the text been dictated, the students from the groups check the spelling and the grammar of the final version of the sentences. The winner can be the most accurate group or the first group finished this challenge. Students may check their works by writing the text on the board, taking their versions from the wall or by reading their texts aloud. Finally, teachers can teach the learners a grammar related to the text. References: Brown, H.D., 2007. Teaching by Principles, Pearson Longman: An interactive approach to Language Pedagogy. New York, pp. 100 -131. Baker, J. and Westrup, H. 2000. The English Language Teachers Handbook. Continuum: London pp. 62-67. Harmer, J. 2007. How to Teach English, pp.146-155 Pearson: NY. Soars, J., and Soars, L., 2000. New Headway English Course. Intermediate workbook. Oxford University Press. Soars, J., and Soars, L., 2001. New Headway English Course. Elementary workbook. Oxford University Press. Read More