Unit Plan for an ESL Class

The knowledge that I have gained in the past 5 weeks of the course will be helpful in my own classes because it has helped to broaden my appreciation of both teaching and learning approaches. Giving students an opportunity to communicate more fully with one another and with teachers is a good way to promote language acquisition and implementing methods that give students more opportunities to receive feedback, focus on grammar, and practice communication techniques is a great way for everyone to progress successfully. I would implement the tips discussed in the book by focusing the class more on active exercises that give students the opportunity to do more than simply sit in a desk and receive a lecture. Students should be getting up, working together, participating in active learning, and having discussions. They should be using the language and not simply just taking notes, listening and taking tests. It is really all about gaining practice and experience and good feedback along the way. As Lightbrown and Spada (2013) have shown, the approaches to teaching are really some of the most important ways that a teacher can make a difference—whether it’s the get it right at first approach or the get it right at last approach, the let’s talk approach or the two for one approach. Each has its merit, and combining as many as possible can really do some good in the classroom.
What I would cover during a week of class would be to go over the parts of speech and how they are used in sentences with examples. I would cover nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs as well as prepositions and so on. We would diagram sentences in class and the students would participate by speaking to one another and attempting to understand information from one another to answer questions that are given them.
The aim of the week’s lesson would be for students to become more familiar with the parts of speech and how they are used in a sentence. It would also be helpful for them to begin to understand how sentences can be diagrammed so that they can see how the grammar operates in a visual manner. This would be combined with a talking exercise that would allow them to use the language as they attempt to answer questions by retrieving information from one another, such as, for example: Find out how old the person to your left is, or ask the person next to how many persons are in their family and what they do for work.
Each class would focus on applying these concepts to basic exercises in the real world, such as how to make greetings, how to discuss topics like hobbies, food, or how one’s day is going or what one does for a living. Asking questions about one’s family or where one lives—basic information that people need to learn to share so that they can make progress in society—it would all be covered in the sentence examples that are diagrammed and in the questions that are asked of the students. This would allow the teacher to make a two-for-one approach in giving students a grammar background and opportunities to talk and learn the language in practice.
Assumptions on topics would include the adult learners being able to read English. Anticipated problems would include pronunciation difficulty and practice speaking. No worksheets or prompts would be needed because it would be basic information such as greetings and where one lives or works that would serve as a the frame for the lesson. Each class would last 60 minutes.
References
Lightbrown, P.M. & Spada, N. (2013). How languages are learned (4th ed.). Oxford
University Press.