2218492

Teaching point: Vocabulary about Place

A: Lesson Plan

In this one hour lasting class, I will adopt the PPP method to teach students the vocabulary of place. By the end of this class, the students will be able to know and use the vocabulary, such as post office, school, hospital, and hotel, etc. They will be able to independently explain each word’s meaning and ultimately apply them to conversations and related situations.

During the teaching, I would like to use printed pictures of the places to let students recognize them and strengthen their memory about the vocabulary through images after acquiring them. Concerning that the printed words will be relatively smaller than the handwriting on the blackboard which may cause some problems for students to see it, I will not use flashcards to do in-class teaching instead of the combination of pictures and blackboard handwriting. Meanwhile, I would like to use the PowerPoint slide to present the exercises without necessarily erasing the reference on the blackboard which could be helpful for students to complete the practice. Furthermore, the printed version of some certain exercises, like filling blanks, is also required to be handed out for each person to help them review the in-class content and their mistakes from the exercise.

The class is divided into three steps: presentation, practice, and production.

The presentation part will start with eliciting the vocabulary we will acquire in this class by showing them pictures of each place to students and designing two explanations of the function of the place to let students guess which one matches the picture. After students know the correct meaning, I would stick the picture on the blackboard and attach the spelling of this word with the stress label of pronunciation. Then, I would check each students’ pronunciation one by one to ensure they have

acquired the current word to move on to the next. This step will approximately last for 20 minutes.

The practice part is divided into controlled practice and freer practice. Both practices will be accomplished by gap-fill exercises. The controlled practice design is based on each place’s function to let learners fill in the right words. Students are encouraged to do peer check after finishing their practice and actively participate in the teacher’s answer check afterward. Then, the freer practice will be designed to a freer form without the only correct answer. Students could voluntarily share their answers with classmates and me by group work. This part will approximately last for 25 minutes.

The production part is more fluency focused by providing students with a clear forum in which L2 is relevant and will hopefully be used. The discussing topic is describing their ideal location of residence if they were living in the town and explaining why. This part will be accomplished by group work and approximately lasts for 15 minutes.

B: Lesson Description

This class is designed for twelve intermediate-level learners of different ages, including adults and teenagers, who are accepting a series of functional language courses for their further use, especially for travel and immigrant. Before this class, they have already acquired basic vocabularies, such as elementary nouns and verbs, and simple sentence structures. Therefore, they are able to handle common daily conversations and understand basic English sentences. Given that their purpose of learning English is to cope with the situations that may be encountered when traveling and living in an English-speaking country, they want to be equipped with the frequently-used vocabulary and functional sentences that can be applied to related situations.

Through this class, students will, ideally, acquire the meaning, pronunciation, and spelling of the vocabulary of place at the presentation part. They are then led to using them from the simple sentences, through the practice part, to a whole related conversation through the production part. Students are expected to know, pronounce, and spell those words well by the end of the class and freely apply them to any situation.

Presentation

At the presentation stage, I will start with a warming up question: where are their most favorite and least favorite places to go? This question is designed to attract students’ attention and raise their interest in participating at the beginning of the class and, also, introduce a hint of today’s teaching point. Students may already have their answer but unable to speak out the precise word of the certain place concerning their current language competence. Then, I will encourage them to describe it based on their existing knowledge, although it will be relatively hard for them to make complete sentences. For example:

S1: My most favorite place is the park, with many things to play with, like toy cars…

T: You mean amusement park?

S1: Amu…?

T: Does it have a lot of children?

S1: Yes.

T: Does it have a rollercoaster? (with gestures)

S1; Yes!!

T: Then, it is the amusement park! Repeat with me. Amusement park. ( Write it down on the blackboard; if it is a word that I have prepared for today’s class, attach the picture I have prepared with the handwriting.)

The purpose of letting students say their least favorite place is considering some places that are less frequently visited are often missed out, such as the hospital and train station. After collecting the words that have been mentioned by students, selecting the most common ones to write on the blackboard with the stress and spelling. Then, I am going to introduce my pre-prepared words one by one, except for those that have been mentioned earlier, through a meaning matching activity. I would prepare two explanations of each word with its image presenting in front to let students choose the right one, and then stick the picture on the blackboard with the same handwriting as the previous words.

After finishing all the writing work, I will lead students to repeat each word three times and ask them to quickly repeat it individually one by one to ensure they have acquired the current word and move on to the next step.

Practice

This part consists of controlled practice and freer practice, and both parts will be accomplished by two gap-fill exercises.

The controlled practice will be twelve and based on the meaning and description of each word on the blackboard, such as:

A/an___is for students to take the classes. (school)

I will present it on the slide while handing out the printed version for students to write down their answers. Through this practice, students will strengthen their understanding of these words by reviewing the descriptions and practicing the spelling. After finishing the exercise, they are encouraged to do a peer check, on the one hand, to check their answer and, on the other hand, practice saying these words. They may make their own mistakes at first, but their answer will be relatively unified after the peer check. Then, I would let each student speak out one of their answers to check with the answer of mine and the others.

Next, when students have basically acquired the new vocabularies, I will start the freer practice. Students are given twelve exercises of gap-fill that they could accomplish based on their individual situation. For example:

I usually go to ___ at weekends.

To some degree, this practice will deepen their memory about the vocabularies and make a preparation for use at the next step from the simple sentences. The exercises are preferably designed with relatively more open answers rather than those can be easily guessed the result, such as:

I usually go ___ after work or class.

The answer ‘home’ can easily be guessed and frequently shown in the students’ feedback. This result does not meet the goal of diversity in answers and the purpose of using as many words on the blackboard as possible instead of everyone producing the same result. Still, students are encouraged to share their answers in a three-person group in order to unconsciously practice using those words from simple sentences to a more complex conversation.

Production

For the production part, I am going to create a topic to let students discuss based on their own likes:

Describing their ideal location of residence if they were living in the town and explaining why.

This topic is closely related to the content of this class which is with a high possibility of using today’s knowledge in their description. The conditions of ‘town’ and ‘location’ offer the learners more choices of the vocabulary of places. Students will also share their thoughts with the group members throughout the whole activity.

They may feel difficulty sharing their preference and thoughts completely and fluently at the start of the group conversation, but they are encouraged to construct their thoughts by chatting with others. When the environment is activated by chats, students will open to share their own feelings and sometimes will be inspired by others’ ideas. Through the group chatting, they will unconsciously form their complete answers from pieces of sentences. For example:

S1: My ideal residence location is near the park because I have three dogs who are super like parks.

S2: Wow, that’s cool! Emm… I want mine near the shopping mall because I like shopping.

S1: That sounds nice! I also want to live around the shopping mall. That’s pretty convenient.

S3: Both sound awesome! But I want to live around the hospital because my grandma is always in hospital, and I want to take care of her.

S2: Oh… It’s so kind of you. I hope your grandma will recover soon. But who said that we could only have one choice, right?

S1: Of course! We can take all of them!

S3: Right! Thank you, guys. Then, I also want a gym by my house. I love working out.

After they have already formed a complete answer, they are also expected to share the answers with the members of another group to form their fragmented chat into a precise and complete paragraph. Through this section, Students are able to use the vocabularies freely in their daily conversation, which is also the aim of this class.

C. Examples of Class Material

Matching Activity

This activity will be placed at the presentation stage to introduce the vocabulary at first. Students are given a picture of each word to recognize the place through the image; they may have already known the word and speak it out in English, or just would say it silently in their native language. Then, I will offer the students two options of description to let students match the correct one to the given picture. After ensuring they have acquired the correct meaning, I will introduce the corresponding word of the picture by repeating the pronunciation and stress the spelling. For example:

Picture: A building with a red cross signal on the top.

Students: Hospital. ( saying with a low volume)

Teacher: (Nod head) This place. Is it for doctors to cure patients, like, when you are sick? Or is it for students to take the class?

Students: Doctors cure patients.

Teacher: Yes! It is the hospital. Follow me. Hospital…

Through this activity, students will acquire the vocabularies efficiently with independently thinking and image supporting.

Gap-fill

This activity will be applied to the practice stage and both at the controlled practice and freer practice. There will be twelve exercises for each practice based on the number of students to ensure everybody will join in the later interactional check of answers. The purpose of controlled practice is to get familiar with and acquire the vocabulary, including its meaning, spelling, and pronunciation. And the purpose of freer practice is to use the vocabularies acquired from the last step into simple individual-based sentences to make a foundation of the conversation of the next stage. The whole acquiring process will be based on the gap-fill exercise. For example:

Controlled practice: A/an___is for doctors to diagnose and cure patients. (hospital)

Freer practice: The ___ is my favorite place to go at weekends.

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