Teach English in LanshAnnanling Linchang - Yongzhou Shi

Is it important to do a lesson plan before a class? Obviously, the answer is “YES”. So why is it so important? and how can it help us with our English teaching? Outlined below is my analysis of this question. In the first instance, lesson planning can help us to set up the subject to be taught and also the aim of each class, allowing us to follow our own instructions. In each class we teach the students about a grammar point, new vocabulary or other parts of speech. What you expect the students to achieve by the end of the lesson, and how you intend to make that possible, a teacher needs to have a solid lesson plan. There are some main conditions that we need to follow when we are doing lesson planning： Try to make it simple because you might need to refer to it during the class. In my experience I would just write the main points to remind me what to teach and how to explain it to the students. Some simple notes about what materials or realia i would need to use as well. Do not teach the class reading from a copy of the lesson plan. A lesson plan is just there to remind you what to do in the class in case you forget or miss something. When the teacher is taking their class, they cannot just read their lesson plan like reading the script of the play, and do activities like robots. Make a good, structured plan and try to anticipate the time for each activity. In unit 9, of this course there is a good example of phase, timing and Interaction that new teachers can use to great affect when planning lessons. Anticipating the timing is also important for the lesson planning stage because it will help you to control the time that you spend on each part of the lesson. Before you do the class, you can practice first to try to run the time schedule and see if your timing is ok or not. There are many other basic principles of lesson planning that I will talk about in this next section. A lesson plan can help us to keep a lesson on target and give us something to refer back to during the class. Lesson planning is very important especially for new English teachers. New English teachers don’t have enough experience in teaching English and also they don’t have enough confidence in front of the students even if it’s just a small class. Because of this, they might forget some teaching points during the lesson, this could affect the teacher’s confidence and the student’s confidence in the teacher. But if you can make a simple to follow lesson plan and follow it during the whole class, it will help you finish the lesson smoothly. What will you include in your lesson planning? The main items include the subject or the aim of the lesson, the grammar points, the vocabulary that you need to teach in this lesson and the problems that you might have with the students or yourself. Each point has a scheduled time slot that you should try to keep to. Other things that factor into a lesson which we can’t always plan for are things like class size, level of students etc. Here i want to say that the ESA method of teaching a lesson is extremely useful in helping us to teach a class. When we write a lesson plan, we can use either a “Straight Arrow“ lesson, “Boomerang” lesson or “Patchwork” lesson structure or indeed a mix of all of them together as long as it will help you achieve your lesson planning goal. It depends on how you do your lesson planning, and how you want to teach. Lesson planning is not only important for new English teachers but also for experienced teachers. The difference between them is maybe the teachers who have experience just need to make some notes about the lesson just as a reminder to focus on the important points or difficulties. Another reason why writing a lesson plan is important is the lesson plan will be a good record of your lesson. When you finish an interesting and informative lesson as you planned, you can summarize the teaching experience easily after the class has finished. We can also record information about the students and if they have understood your teaching methods and more importantly if the students learned from your teaching methods. Having this record also enables you to keep track of any problems or errors that you as the teacher may have made during the class. We can track the language points and any problems that occurred, so you can prepare more exercises and language points for the next lesson. Also probably one of the most important aspects of a good lesson plan is that if you’re ill or can’t take the class for some reason, another teacher should, with the same experience be able to pick up your lesson plan and give the class with relative ease. In conclusion we could write so much more about the benefits of a well-structured lesson plan and the positive effect it has on both students and teachers but from this brief overview we can see that having a lesson plan is so very important when giving an ESA lesson.