View Content #25799

By Isabelle Sackville-West, CASLS Fellow

This teacher planning guide is designed to complement this week’s Topic of the Week article.  It helps teachers design function-based lessons for their classrooms by guiding them to articulate only the grammar and vocabulary content that is critical.

Objective: Teachers will be able to articulate what grammatical structures and vocabulary are essential for performing a specific language function.

Materials needed: Planning Sheet

Procedure:

For each step, refer to the planning sheet.

1. First, teachers should select a topic or content that they want to address with their lesson. For example, the topic could be a specific daily interaction like greetings or service encounters.
2. Then, narrowing in further, teachers will select a single language function to focus on in a lesson. For greetings, it might be greeting a friend. For service encounters, it might be negotiating a price.
3. After selecting the topic and function, teachers should spend some time brainstorming language content (grammatical structures and vocabulary) that are necessary for performing the given language function and related content (such as verb forms that are unnecessary or related, but unnecessary vocabulary) should not be taught.
4. Next, teachers will think critically about the content that they came up with during the brainstorm in Step 3. They should answer the following questions:  1) Is it relevant?; 2) Is it authentic to how expert speakers use language?; 3) Is it necessary to successfully carry out the language function? These questions will guide limiting the list of language content until the teacher has identified what is absolutely necessary.

Note: For lessons that include additional targeted language functions, teachers should follow Steps 1-4 for each function individually.