Writing a Consistent TEFL Lesson Plan

Learning English has always been a priority for non-English speakers who want to study or work abroad and advance in their careers.

It also remains our reality now, with 750 million people learning English as a foreign language (EFL) and 375 studying it as a second language (ESL), making it over 1 billion English learners in total. The difference between these two groups is that EFL students use English only occasionally, while those who learn it as a second language use English on a daily basis.

The ever-rising demand for English courses also increases the need for teachers who know the methodology of teaching English as a foreign language. Their task is to help students gain the skills necessary to speak English fluently by organizing the lesson in a way that would facilitate the use of these skills.

As a platform that exists to support EFL teachers, today, we want to share with you a few useful tips on how to write a consistent TEFL lesson plan that will offer a versatile approach to learning English and will be aligned with the demands of diverse learning.

1. Choose Your TEFL Lesson Objectives

A lesson objective in terms of teaching English as a foreign language is an instructional goal that aims at helping students acquire a certain skill or knowledge and possesses the following characteristic features:

●      specific

●      measurable

●      short-term

●      observable

One TEFL lesson can have several objectives, each of which should be precisely defined to help you find and pick the activities that would help you guide your students in acquiring the skill or knowledge.

For instance, a TEFL lesson objective can be to teach students how to write descriptive essays. To achieve this objective, you would need to create a list of topics for such essays, provide step-by-step writing instructions, and share the tools your students could benefit from while writing.

How to write clear TEFL lesson objectives?

Here’s a simple formula you can follow:

● Start phrasing your objective by summing up the knowledge or the skill your students should get as a result: “At the end of the lesson, students will be able to…”

● Use an action verb like apply, express, explain, etc. that would define your objective and help you measure it.

● Conclude your objective by mentioning a specific situation in which a learner would demonstrate their newly acquired skill or knowledge. It’s best to include the activity which your students will practice during the lesson.

Let’s use this formula to phrase the objective we mentioned above: “At the end of the lesson, students will be able to write a descriptive essay on the topic of traveling.”

You can use this formula for all the objectives of your TEFL lesson plan, but keep in mind that you will need an activity that will help you measure each of these objectives. Let’s talk about that a bit more.

2. Find Activities that Meet Lesson Objectives

Every TEFL lesson should include four main activities:

● vocabulary

● grammar

● speaking

●  writing

For example, Solutions, a popular coursebook used for teaching EFL and ESL, includes every one of these activities in each lesson:

As you may have noticed, every activity corresponds to a certain objective that students will reach once they complete the unit.

If you’re using a book like Solutions, you already have all the activities necessary to reach the lesson objectives. However, you can also include additional activities to lead your students to the main activities. For example:

● Start a lesson with a warm-up. For example, you can introduce the topic of the lesson by having a conversation that leads to it.

● Gamify the experience. You can dedicate the first 10 minutes of the lesson to a competition to check the past simple and future-in-the-past simple if your lesson’s topic is second conditional sentences.

● Try listening. For instance, if your lesson covers the topic of sports, you can pick a video or audio that has words related to the topic in it and have your students listen and write down these words.

Keep in mind that your TEFL lesson plan should also include all the tools and materials you want to share with your students, especially if they will be doing some activities at home. For example, if their home task would be to write an essay on a popular topic, you might need to search for relevant ideas at TrustMyPaper or SupremeDissertations then choose those that are related to the topic and the objectives of your lesson, and after that, provide step-by-step writing instructions for your students.

3. Plan Your Lesson Minute-by-Minute

TEFL lessons are always rich with activities, all of which should be included in the plan, as they play an equal part in forming foreign language competency.

That’s why it is important to plan these activities minute-by-minute to make sure they are all present and you have enough time for each of them.

So, try to schedule each activity based on the duration of your lesson. For instance, here’s the rough plan for a 45-minute TEFL lesson:

1) Welcoming students and reviewing last week’s material – 5 minutes.

2) Introducing the new topic with a short text containing relevant vocabulary – 5 minutes.

3) Reviewing the vocabulary, translating it, give examples of sentences (together with students) – 5 minutes.

4) Writing and acting out a dialog on the topic, 5 sentences per student – 10 minutes.

5) Explaining the new grammatical topic – 7 minutes

6) Doing grammatical exercises – 10 minutes

7) Giving and explaining home tasks – 3 minutes

Following such a schedule will help you make your TEFL lesson more consistent and make sure that your students practice all the activities necessary to achieve lesson objectives.

Conclusion

Teaching English as a foreign language is a rewarding experience, as you see your students’ rapid progress in mastering this difficult language. But because it’s difficult, learning this language requires thorough planning.

Having an organized TEFL lesson that includes clear objectives, activities to help reach these objectives, and a minute-by-minute schedule is important to achieve consistency in both teaching and learning. Hopefully, our tips will help you write a TEFL lesson plan that will help you achieve this consistency and make the learning process efficient.