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Teach English in Dahekan Zhen - Hanzhong Shi

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The primary reason I selected this topic is that I find it very difficult to write a detailed and well structured lesson plan. It takes more time than the actual lesson. The secondary reason was to learn more about planning and to find somehow a happy medium for that. First I am going to describe a lesson plan with its parts, secondly the functions of writing a lesson plan and lastly my opinion and conclusion. A lesson plan is a detailed description about the course, a particular lesson. Normally it is written by the teacher but there are some schools where the lesson plans, syllabuses are provided. A lesson plan should include some details about the circumstances of the course: time and date, duration, the teacher’s name and how many students are expected to be in the class. These are not essential to the teaching point but there are helpful for planning the procedure and for keeping track with the taught lessons. The main part of the lesson plan contains the language point (what is the aim of this lesson, what are we going to teach), teaching aids (what aids we use in the class), the learner objective (what should the students by the end of the lesson know), our personal aims with this particular lesson (what are we going to improve), anticipated problems not only by the students but by the teacher too, the procedure (the activities used to achieve the language objectives), phase (parts of the lesson: engage, study, activate), timing (how long each activity is expected to take). According to Jeremy Harmer (The Practice of English Language Teaching, Third Edition, page 308) before we start to make a lesson plan we need to consider a number of crucial factors such as the language level of the class, their cultural background, their level of motivation and their different learning styles. If we are going to teach an unknown new group, this part of the lesson plan could be problematic. For that very reason should be the aim of the first meeting just to getting to know the students, their language level and their interests. Writing lesson plans has important functions. The first benefit would be to aid teachers. Usually while we write a lesson plan we think through the stages and we imagine what we expect at every activity. Another benefit is that we have a record about what and when have we taught a class. Initially the purpose of writing a lesson plan was to help the teacher throughout the lesson, to have a sketch about the language point and the procedure. Still after my opinion it can be a barrier in some cases. During a lesson it is vital to consider what students understand, and if we discover some incompleteness or language problems arise from the lesson we should reorganize and take sufficient time to explain and clear the misunderstandings. If we are strict about the plan and cannot be flexible in such scenarios it does not benefit the main goal. I think that inexperienced teachers should write detailed lesson plans for every lesson but always have in mind that they should be flexible and open to reorganize the activities. Writing a detailed lesson plan could take a lot of time and energy but at the beginning of a teaching career it helps a lot. After they gain some experience and are more comfortable in the class they can leave out some details that are evident. In my opinion a happy medium would be a short sketch about the procedure. In this way they are automatically open to students’ reaction.


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