Lesson Plan

Name: Grama Irina Cătălina

Date:the 12-th of January

Form: 7-th

Level:Pre-intermediate

Class size:20 students

Textbook: Snapshot,Pre-Intermediate,Longman,2001

Lesson: Vocabulary lesson-Food and cooking-You Ought to Try Them!

Type of lesson: consolidation and revision of knowledge

Time: 50 minutes

Objectives:

affective:-to create a pleasant atmosphere for study;

               -to make the students confident in the ability of using the English language and to use their knowledge in real life situations;

               -to work in pairs or in groups;

-to identify weak areas and provide opportunities for consolidation.

     At the end of the lesson the students will be able:

-          to recognize and give examples of words related to food and cooking;

-          to  identify utensils,ingredients,verbs connected to preparing and cooking food from a listening material;

-          to choose the correct order of the instructions of a recipe ;

-          to use their vocabulary related to the topic in order to describe a recipe;

-          to recognize a dish from a short description;

Skills:  Speaking, Listening, Reading, Writing

Methods of teaching:

-          Brainstorming

-          Conversation

-          Communicative Method

Teaching techniques:  individual work, group work, elicitation,webbing,game-describe the recipe, guess the dish

Description:This lesson plan is designed to consolidate the studentsvocabulary about cooking and to evaluate their understanding in order to describe a recipe

Preliminary lesson planning:

Materials:blackboard

-          chalk

-          worksheets

-          flipcharts, pictures,markers

-          riddle

I.                   Warm up activity (2 minutes): listening and singing-the song Happy-Pharell Williams

II.                Lead-in(3minutes)

Purpose:

    To create an appropriate atmosphere for the lesson

    To activate background knowledge, in order to introduce learners to the topic.

Procedure:

          T. greets the students and checks attendance.Checks their homework

          To introduce the new lesson,Ttelle the Ss about a great meal at the restaurant.T asks questions like:Do you like to eat?What do you like to eat?What is your favouritedish?What about cooking?Do you cook?Have you ever cooked for your family?This way T makes the transition to the vocabulary to be revised-food and cooking.

Skillsinvolved:speaking,listening.

Feedback:T appreciate all the good answers and encourages all the students to participate.

Interaction:T-Ss,Ss-Ss

II. Activity 1.Revision of vocabulary related to cooking(15minutes)

      Purpose-To give examples of words related to food and cooking-verbs connected to cooking,utensils,ingredients;

Materials:blackboard

Procedure: the next stage is an oral completion step.Twrites on the blackboard key words like food,cooking,utensils,ingredients.Ss identify words connected to each of the key words.T asks the Sswewre they can use all of these words in real life situations.T asks questions in order to get to the word recipe.

Feedback –T appreciates the good answers and  encourage all the Ss to participate.

Skills:speaking,

Interaction:T-Ss,Ss-T,

III.Activity 2-Listening a recipein order to find the missing words(14 minutes)

Purpose:-to  identify utensils, ingredients, verbs connected to preparing and cooking food from a listening material;

Materials-a listening material of 40 sec.-the description of a recipe, worksheets

Procedure: T gives instructions to the Ss for the listening stage. Ss listen the material two times:the first time without pauses and the second time with pauses. They will complete the first exercisefrom the worksheet with the missing words while listening the material the second time.The second exercise involves a matching task using quantifiers.After they finish the worksheet they switch the papers with their mates.Here it is used peer-correction.T evaluates their answers and corrects errors.

Feedback:T offers feedback, encouraging all the students to ask for the next stages.

Skills:speaking,listening,writing

Interaction:T-Ss,Ss-T

IV.Activity 3.Find the order of the instructions(10 minutes)

Purpose:-to choose the correct order of the instructions of a recipe ;

-to use their vocabulary related to the topic in order to describe a recipe;

Materials:worksheet,flipcharts,pictures,markers

Procedure:1.T splits the Ss in four groups,gives them flipcharts and a picture with the chocolate cake and different pictures with ingredients.They have to complete first the ingredients and then to cut up the instructions to find the right order of the cooking steps. Ss work in group and after a stated time they present in front of the class their charts. T encourages selfcorrection and peer-correction .

Skills:writing,speaking

Feedback-T.offers feedback appreciates the good answers ,the right completion of task.

Interaction:T-Ss ,Ss-Ss

V.Activity 4-riddle time (4 minutes):

Purpose:

To see if the Ss guess a dish using the description of the recipe.

Procedure:T reads three riddles.She describes the recipe and they have to guess the dish .Ss guess the dishes.T

Feedback:T evaluates the Ss”answers and the whole class activity.T asks Ss to insist in repeating every week the vocabulary.

Skills:speaking

Interaction:T-Ss,Ss-T

VI .Homework assignment(2 minutes)

T asks the Ss to choose their favourite food and to describe the recipe.

Evaluation-T congrats all the good answers ,praise the best answers with good marks and evaluates orally the whole class performance.

Error correction – advantages and disadvantages for students

Prof.Grama Irina Cătălina,ȘcoalaGimnazialăGâdinți

            When learning a language, errors are unavoidable. Error reflects the level of second students’ proficiency. Students’ errors may be caused by many factors: first language interference, inadequate second language knowledge, complexity of the second language, overgeneralization, and/or psycholinguistic, cognitive and affective variables.

            Corrective feedback has been considered helpful in achieving successful communicative competence in second language.

            Some studies maintain that if errors are neglected this will be at the expense of second language accuracy[1], and other[2] suggest that immediate feedback during classroom interaction can lead to improved accuracy.

            The aim is to develop students’ communicative fluency, and in consequence, error correction has to be kept to a minimum, with priority to errors that tangle communication.

            One goal of teaching grammar is to give students the terminology for naming the words and word groups that make up sentences-in other words, the parts of speech and the language of phrases and clauses. In some ways, this goal is the most controversial aspect of teaching grammar. Some teachers sorely resent the time they are required to spend teaching grammatical analysis. They do not see any connection between teaching students to identify the parts of speech and preparing them to communicate effectively in the real world. And, worst of all, they report that their students do not like grammar at all. But for other teachers, the key to teaching grammatical terminology is making the activity meaningful, and the way to make it meaningful is to connect it with student writing and with their reading as well. Knowing grammatical terminology is not an end in itself but a means toward greater awareness of how language and literature work.

            The types of correction[3] are:

v  Explicit correction: the teacher clearly states that student’s error is incorrect and then provides the correct form. The teacher may use expressions such as You should say, Use this word, or You mean… .

v  Recast: the teacher implicitly reformulates (paraphrases) all or part of the  student’s error or provides the correction

v  Clarification requests: the teacher uses phrases such as Excuse me?orI do not understand, to indicate that the utterance of the student was misunderstood by the teacher and hence a repetition or reformulation by the student is necessary.

v  Metalinguistic clues: the teacher provides information, comments or questions related to the student’s incorrect utterance indicating the occurrence of an error, such as Do we say it like that in English?

v  Elicitation: the teacher asks questions to elicit the correct form from the student (pushing the student to use the correct form) such as Say that again, for the student to reformulate his/her enunciation.

v  Repetition: the teacher repeats the student’s error and adjusts intonation to draw the student’s attention to it, such as an cake?when the student makes an error An … an cake, as an incorrect use of article.

            The first two types of error correction (explicit correction and recast) are characterized by the teacher’s intervention to provide students with the correct form or to reformulate correctly, thus eliminating self-repair by the student. Clarification requests, metalinguistic clues, elicitation and repetition are more helpful because they force students to correct themselves.

As students are pushed by teachers to repair incorrect forms, they try to reformulate their initial enunciation in response to their teacher’s feedback. This feedback-reformulation process ensures that students are actively engaged in learning second language forms by discussing the form in some way before reformulating. The success rate of elicitation is 100%, clarification requests - 88%, metalinguistic clues - 86% and repetition - 78% indicates that these are the most effective types of error correction[4]. The teachers should draw students’ attention to their errors by providing cues, thus forcing them to draw on their own linguistic resources to correct themselves.

            In conclusion, error correction helps second language students to develop their linguistic, discourse and strategic competencies as it aims to ensure correct communication of messages.

            Teachers should discern the difference between global and local errors: the local errors usually need not be corrected since the message is clear and correction might interrupt a student in the flow of productive communication, while global errors need to be threatening in some way since the massage may otherwise remain garbled. Many expressions are not clearly global or local, and it is difficult to discern necessity for corrective feedback.

            The problem of how to treat errors is complex. There is not one the most effective method or technique to correct errors. In generally, students want and expect errors to be corrected.

The best way to help a student to repair malformed enunciations is, first, to assist the student in noticing an incorrect form and second, for the student to initiate repair.

The teacher needs to develop the intuition, trough experience and established theoretical foundation, for ascertaining which option or combination of options is appropriate at given moments. Principles of optimal affective and cognitive feedback, of reinforcement theory, and of communicative language teaching all combine to form those intuitions.

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[1]Whitley, M. S., “Communicative Language Teaching: an Incomplete Revolution”, Foreign Language Annals, 26 (2): 137-154, 1993, p. 140.

[2]Lightbown, P., Spada, N., How languages are learned, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1992.

[3]Lyster, R., and  Ranta, L., “Corrective feedback and learner uptake: Negotiation of form in communicative classrooms”, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 19, 1997, pp. 46-48.

[4]Lyster, R., and  Ranta, L., “Corrective feedback and learner uptake: Negotiation of form in communicative classrooms’’, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 19, 1997, p. 56.