Foreign language lesson planning

How to Structure Lessons?• Present new material • Motivate students • Prepare them to engage with the material • Ensure they are ready to learn • Balance of lecture and interactive pract

Foreign Language Lesson Planning

SASLI: June 2007

Benjamin Rifkin

Temple University

b r i f k i n @ t e m p l e e d u

How to Structure Lessons?

• Present new material

• Motivate students

• Prepare them to engage with the material

• Ensure they are ready to learn

• Balance of lecture and interactive practice

• Integration of language and culture

Other Considerations

• Balance of grammar and communicative practice

• How and when (whether!) to correct errors

• Correlation of lesson design and course

design

• Correlation of course design and curricular design

Still More Considerations

• External influences (literature or linguistics curriculum, preparation for study abroad)

• Dialect choices

• Heritage and foreign language learners

• Availability of textbooks

• Availability of technology

Importance of Motivation

• Heritage learners who have some modicum

of communicative skills may have little

interest in acquiring more language until you prove to them why they should do so

• Foreign language learners may have difficulty understanding why they need to learn a

particular structure that seems so foreign

Balance of Grammar and Communication

• Multiple curricular tracks?

• Grammatical competence of critical

importance only at the superior level

• If we ignore it at the beginning, students may never work to acquire it

• Bearing in mind expectations for development

of grammatical competence at all levels of

instruction

Interactive Learning

• Impact of imbalance of teacher talk

• How we learn to swim or drive

• Active learning in other disciplines

• Learning by doing in the American

educational system

• Performance in the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines

Curricular Design

• Proficiency Guidelines

• Learning Outcomes Research

• Number of hours of instruction

• Difficulty classification of your target language

Course and Lesson Design

• Krashen’s i + 1

• Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development

Lesson Design

• Motivate students

• Prepare students

• Present to students

• Engage students in interactive practice

• Check that students have mastered the targeted language material, function, task

• Follow-Up

• Explain briefly to the students what we are

doing and why we are doing it

• Keep this brief

• Use target language if possible, use English if not

• Overview may be written on the board, in the course syllabus, etc

Prime and Preview

• Provide students with opportunity to review language structures from previous lessons, structures they will need in today’s lesson, or preview something coming (e.g.,

pronunciation)

• “Mind the gap!”

• Receptive and productive review and preview

• Teacher-guided or teacher-fronted

• Remember i + 1

• Make sure that language presented is

meaningful for students

• Do not ask students to perform until they are ready or risk enhanced anxiety

• Students use new language material to

communicate meaningfully with one another

• Information gap is essential

• Information gap may be authentic or contrived

• Students must be working in pairs or groups

• Extended performance period

Practice Do’s and Don’t’s

• Do observe student performance

• Don’t participate in that performance

• Do observe student errors

• Don’t correct student errors

• Do coach

• Don’t impose, don’t intrude

• Ask students to report singly or in groups

• No need to ask all students to report, you can manage this as a random check

• Make sure all students know they are going to

be held accountable

Accountability (2)

• Don’t correct individual errors

• Consider individual student errors as

evidence of failure to master a particular point

• After all groups you will check have

presented, correct the most salient errors

(choose carefully)

• Ask for choral repetitions to reduce stigma

• Another practice activity to show competence

• Discussion of cultural implications

• Analysis of strategy use (students share with one another)

How Does It Work?

• Three-four modules in one 50-minute lesson

• Each module builds into the next

• Each instructional unit (one to two weeks) has its own pattern with more grammar and

vocabulary drill lessons in the beginning and more intensive comunication towards the end

Your Questions?