Guidelines
for Publishing in My Contribution
Coordintor:
Jafar Dorri
The
column entitled My Contribution is a recent initiative which is intended
to be a forum for sharing lesson plans and procedures for classroom activities.
Our assumption is that all teachers have original ideas for running their
lessons which work for them. We welcome a contribution which reflects an
original idea. Ideas taken from teachers’ guides can be of no help unless they
are sufficiently modified. The sign of an original idea is that it is a source
of excitement and pride to the originator to the extent that he/she would like
to tell others how it works. You can imagine yourself telling your colleague in
a very simple clear language how you carry out the activity in your class in a
stepwise manner. As your account is procedural it follows a certain structure
which is different from the structure of a research article. The column
includes instructions which tell the reader how to carry out the teaching
activities like the ones one can find in a recipe. In some cases specially in
the conclusion part you might want to provide a rationale for the activity by
referring to the literature but this needs to be kept at a minimum.
It
should be noted that a lesson plan is the blueprint of those teaching
activities that are to be done in the classroom to teach the textbook content
with the aim of achieving its objectives. Every teacher tries to plan the
content in his/her own style so that he/she can teach systematically and
effectively. You can see the detailed guidelines for writing My Contribution
in in the box below.
Your “My Contribution” should include:
• A title, your name,
affiliation, and email address;
• A “Quick guide” to the
activity or teaching technique;
• No more than 700 words
excluding the appendixes;
• An introduction (i.e.
overview) followed by preparation and procedure steps and a conclusion.
It should
be:
• In Microsoft Word format;
• Double-spaced with an extra space between
sections.
Using
Tasks in Teaching English
Quick
guide
Learner
English level:
Pre-intermediate
Preparation: 10 minutes
Materials: a map, a poster,
pictures of historical places of Iran, magnets, whiteboard or a video projector
to display some photos
Introduction
TBLT is
an approach which is based on the use of tasks as the core unit of planning and
instruction in language teaching (Richards & Rodgers, 2003: 223). For
Scrivener (2011: 183) TBLT is a general term for some more variations on the
“exposure-test-teach-test” lesson structure. But what is a task? Nunan
(1989:10) states that task is a piece of classroom activity which involves
learners in comprehending, manipulating, producing, and interacting in the
target language while their attention is basically focused on meaning rather
than form of the language. Here in this lesson, I would like to share a lesson
designed based on TBLT.
Step 1
The
teacher asks students if they have seen a tourist or not. He, then, asks
students to talk together about their experience in this regard. After some
minutes, he asks some students to share their experiences with their
classmates. He then asks students the following questions:
1. Which
cities are more famous for tourists to visit in Iran?
2. Where
can you find many palaces in Iran?
3. Which
city is the historical capital city of Iran?
4. Which
city is famous for its mosques?
Step 2
The teacher then starts talking
about the four cities he would show a group of tourists in a four-day tour:
Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz, and Yazd.
He also shows some real pictures
of the places to students using the following sentences.
Yazd is famous for its mosques.
Isfahan is famous for its
mosques and palaces.
There are a lot of museums and
tall buildings in Tehran.
Mashhad is famous for Imam Reza
Holy Shrine.
Shiraz is famous for Hafez
Tomb.
Step 3
The teacher then gives students
some matching tasks and asks them to match and make correct sentences (Appendix
1). He also works on sentence stress and intonation of the sentences. The
teacher then informs students that a group of tourists are coming to visit Iran
for 3 days. He asks students to make a plan for a 3-day visit to Iran. The
teacher gives each group a map and a poster to make their plan (Appendix 2).
Step 4
The teacher monitors for support
and makes notes of the good and bad language that students use during the task.
Students then will have one minute to prepare a report for the class. The plans
will be pinned to the board and group representatives report what they did and
what they have included. The teacher writes on the board some good language he
heard from students and some erroneous sentences.
Step 5
The teacher encourages good
sentences and asks everyone to write them down. He also asks them to repeat the
good models. He elicits the correct form of the erroneous sentences and asks
students to repeat them. The teacher also accentuates the sentence stress and
intonation, as well.
Step 6
The teacher gives the whole
class another chance to make a new plan as a class using the correct language.
He gives them another A3/A4 blank sheet paper to do so. He monitors students’
work and checks the language they are using to do the task. He provides support
where necessary. The teacher gives students the questionnaire (Appendix 3) to
find out students’ ideas about the lesson. He also informally talks to them and
asks if they liked the lesson or not. Why? Why not? Finally, students receive a
self-reflection questionnaire to think back about the experience and express
their feelings (Appendix 3).
Appendix 1
Answer Key
1. C
2. D
3. A
4. E
5. B
Appendix 2
Appendix 3
Student questionnaire
1. Were your mistakes corrected?
Can you give me examples?
2. What new phrases did you
learn?
3. Did you enjoy the lesson?
Why?
Why not?
4. Would you like to have more
of this lesson type? Why? Why not?
Appendix 4
Self-reflection form
1) What I liked about the
experience.
2) What I didn’t like about the
experience.
3) How differently I will teach
the same lesson next time. Why?
References
Nunan, D. (1989). Designing
Tasks for the Communicative Classroom. Cambridge: CUP.
Richards, J., & Rodgers, T.
(2003). Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching. Cambridge: CUP.
Scrivener, J. (2011). Learning
Teaching: The Essential Guide to English Language Teaching. Oxford. Macmillan
Education.