The ESA Methodology of Teaching - The Activate Phase
And so on to the final phase of the ESA lesson, which is called the activate phase. What we have done so far, if you remember, is to engage the students, to get them talking and thinking in English, where possible we've elicited the teaching point from the students and covered any gaps in knowledge to make sure that the teaching point has been fully covered and then we've checked understanding of that teaching point by asking targeted and specific questions. Usually the types of activities that we've done for the study phase will involve using a single word in order to answer those questions correctly this, however, is not how language is actually used. When we use language, we always use it in some form of context. So the purpose of the activate activity is to put that teaching material into some form of context, something realistic that the students would actually use. Okay, so, let's look at some typical activities that could be used for the activate stage of a lesson. Remember what we're trying to do is to get the students to use the language that they've learned in some form of realistic context. So, typical activities may include role plays, where the students take on the role of a doctor or a dentist or a patient and they actually generate a set of language that uses this particular teaching. Another example that they could do would be surveys, where each of the students get up and they go around and they ask questions of all the other students. This type of activity, where all students get up and interact with each other, is often called a mill drill. The final type of activity that we'll put in here is that the students can have a debate about a particular subject. Now, if we think about the activities that we're doing here, what we can see as opposed to the study activities, where we had targeted specific language, each of these activities is actually going to generate different answers depending upon which student we interview or have the role play for. So, this is using language in a realistic way rather than just answering a single question.
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