Staging a Lesson
A lesson should not just be a collection of activities that are somehow thrown together. Your job as a teacher is to curate the flow of the lesson so that it feels logical and cohesive, while meeting the aims that you have defined.
Where to Begin
There are a number of lesson frameworks that you are likely to be introduced to on a CELTA course. If you have some teaching experience, you may have heard of some of them already. The one thing that they all have in common however is a lead in.
Common Lesson Frameworks
There are different lesson frameworks that you will be expected to use on CELTA depending on what type of lesson you are trying to deliver. By the end of the CELTA course, you should have a pretty good idea of which framework to use for each type of lesson, and the stages involved.
The frameworks presented below are not necessarily the only options possible, but they are the ones most often taught on CELTA and other initial teacher training courses. They include:
- PPP
- TTT
- text-based lesson
- receptive skills framework
- product writing (or speaking)
- process writing (or speaking)
- TBL
PPP
PPP stands for presentation, practice, production. This is a framework for teaching either grammar or vocabulary. It is not suitable for teaching skills.
If, for example, you were teaching vocabulary about holidays, you would first deal with presenting these words or phrases. This could be by showing a picture and eliciting what is in the picture. The students might then practice putting the words into gapped sentences or a paragraph. Finally, students have a (usually) spoken task in which they will use the words such as describing the holidays they have been on in the past.
If you were teaching “used to”, you would start by presenting this structure. Students would then have some practice such as putting “used to” in gapped sentences. Finally students would produce “used to” perhaps by discussing how their life is different now.
While this framework appears very logical and simple, there are a number of problems with it. Firstly, it assumes that students don’t know any of what is being taught. Really, you would only know what they knew when you got to the production stage, and at this point you might assume that the fact students are using the target language is down to your brilliant teaching. In fact, they might have already known it.
Secondly, because the production stage is at the end, this is the part that teachers struggle to make adequate time for. In many cases, students already know the target language, but what they need is time to use it.
PPP is therefore better suited to lower levels who you can assume know less. Elementary students might be looking at the present perfect for the first time, for example. It is unlikely to be appropriate at above an intermediate level. Even at pre-intermediate, students will have met a lot of language points previously.
A better framework therefore is likely to be TTT.
TTT
TTT stands for either test, teach, test or task, teach, task. This is often seen as preferable to a PPP framework, especially if students have met the language point before.
A TTT framework follows a lead in with a task or exercise to test what students already know of the target language. Generally, we want to test what students can use spontaneously in conversation, so this is likely to be a task that resembles the production phrase of a PPP lesson. For example, if I want to know whether students can use narrative tenses, the obvious thing to do would be to have them tell each other an anecdote.
Monitoring during this test or task stage is very important in order to know how well the students performed. To simplify it somewhat, let’s just say that you are trying to confirm which of the following best describes the class:
- The students didn’t know the target language;
- The students knew some of the target language;
- The students knew all of the target language.
Deciding which of these statements is most accurate is the key to this framework, because whatever you do in the teach stage should be based on what you observed. If it is clear to you that the students knew all of the target language, why would you still teach it to them? If they knew some of it, then you focus on what they didn’t know. And if they know none of it, then you start to build the foundations of that language point.
The implication for planning is that you need to have different contingencies planned. These may not need to be wildly different. In the case of a vocabulary lesson with ten new words or phrases as the target language, you might decide:
- If they don’t know any – teach the 5 simplest ones;
- If they know some – listen for 5 they didn’t know and teach those;
- If they knew them all – have 5 others prepared and teach those instead.
After clarifying the language and checking students understand it, a controlled practice activity usually follows. This allows students to begin practising the language point.
The next stage is a second test or task stage. In this stage you are attempting to ascertain that the students have learnt what you taught them while giving them another chance to use the target language.
The final test or task could theoretically be the same as the first. However, this runs the risk of being boring for students, while also having the issue that students would likely do better the second time around in any task.
Hopefully, you can see the advantage of a TTT lesson over a PPP one. As a teacher you will be planning to adapt your lesson based upon the students’ needs.
Text-based Lesson
Not to be confused with the receptive skills framework, a text-based lesson is for teaching vocabulary or grammar using a text (which may either be a reading or a listening).
The text is introduced after the lead in along with a gist task (remember that a text should never be introduced without any task). A gist task is one that focuses students on understanding the general meaning of a text.
Now that students have understood the text on some level, it is time to draw their attention to language in the text. This could be by asking them to underline particular items or matching a word or phrase with an equivalent in the text.
After this, the staging for this lesson framework follows a typical PPP sequence. A presentation stage is used to convey meaning, form and pronunciation and check students’ understanding, following which students are given some form of controlled practice. Finally, the lesson progresses to a freer practice or production activity.
Receptive Skills
A receptive skills framework is designed for the two receptive skills (listening and reading). This is the only option generally offered on a CELTA (although other options do exist) and it is pretty difficult to get wrong – though people do!
After the lead in has set the context for the audio or reading text, you might choose to pre-teach some language that will help students to understand the text. However, you should bear in mind that pre-teaching potentially deprives students of a chance to deal to deal with unknown vocabulary themselves, which is a valuable skill. Nevertheless, your CELTA tutor will likely expect to see a couple of items being pre-taught.
When selecting items for pre-teaching, you want to choose words or phrases that:
- Are new for students.
- Will be necessary for solving the tasks you will set.
- Are not guessable from the context.
After pre-teaching, you will generally have at least two reading or listening stages that deal with different reading strategies (you may hear tutors refer to them as sub-skills instead).
Typically, you have three options to choose from:
- Reading/listening for gist (to get a general understanding of the text)
- Reading/listening for specific information (to find particular details)
- Reading/listening for details (to get a deeper understanding)
When setting tasks, we tend to go from general (i.e. gist) to specific (i.e. specific information or detail). Therefore, the first task tends to be either gist or specific information, while the second task tends to be for details.
A common sequence in coursebooks is the predict and check combination. For example, if I have an audio about a person who had a problem with an item of clothing they bought online, I could ask students to guess what problem he had. Then they listen to check whether one of their guesses was correct. This could equally be done by giving a headline, a picture or just some clues and having the students predict what they will read or hear.
A specific information task checks specific details such as numbers, dates, places or name. There are a variety of questions that can do this though closed questions and true/false statements tend to be popular.
Detailed meaning tasks focus more on the meaning that is less explicit in the text, often asking students to infer from what is said or written. These might involve more open questions as there may be more room for individual interpretation.
After the reading or listening stages, there are several post stages that may follow.
One stage that can follow is post-teaching. We already looked at pre-teaching. Post-teaching solves the problem of denying students an opportunity to deal with new vocabulary themselves. If they still have problems with new vocabulary it can be sorted out here.
Finally, a productive follow on is usually expected on the CELTA. This typically involves students using the information contained within the text to do some speaking activity (though a written exercise would also be fine but more difficult to fit into the timeframe of a CELTA lesson). For example, if the text gave tips about getting a better deal when shopping, a simple speaking activity is for students to say which they would use and share their own tips.
Product Writing (or Speaking)
As you might guess, product writing is aimed at teaching writing, although the same framework can be applied to speaking lessons.
After the lead in, a model is introduced. This is a model of the type of writing (or speaking) that is expected to be produced at the end of the lesson. The model shouldn’t just be given, but should be accompanied by an exercise that gets them to read (or listen to) it. This could include turning the text into a gap fill, or it could be a gist task to check their global understanding.
Once the model has been introduced, you need to highlight language or other linguistic features for students. One approach would be to tell the students what you want them to notice, but this is the kind of teacher-centred teaching that we are trying to get you away from on a CELTA. A better option would be to give them something to look for and find themselves. For example, in a letter, you might tell to find five ways the writer is being polite, or in an advertisement for a product, you might direct the students to find examples of descriptive language.
The next stage is to start preparing students to write their own version of the model (or conduct their own spoken version). This means planning their ideas and the language they will use.
The final stage is then for students to produce a similar piece of writing (or speaking). As a general rule, writing is a solitary activity and students should generally be prepared to produce their own text.
There can be one more stage, and if you want to grow your students’ interest in writing it is highly recommended. In this case, the final stage is the publication stage. That doesn’t mean you actually publish your students’ work, but that you create a scenario in which your students read each others’ work. Students then engage in giving feedback to each other. A simple way to do this is to put the finished work on the walls of the classroom and send students around to read them with a question such as “which do you like best?”
Process Writing (or Speaking)
The opposite of a product writing is a process writing lesson. As with product writing, this framework can be adapted to speaking lessons too.
The idea of a process writing lesson is to focus less on the final piece of work and more on developing the writing process.
Rather than starting from a model, a process writing lesson starts with planning. Telling students to plan a piece of writing is however a daunting task without a model. Instead, the planning stage tends to consist of brainstorming activities such as thinking of the advantages and disadvantages of something.
The next stage is drafting. Again, asking students to produce something whole may still be daunting at this stage. Instead, the lesson may focus on writing smaller parts such as sentences or paragraphs. If focussing on essays, for example, this could focus on writing topic statements or a body paragraph rather than the whole essay.
Once parts of the text are drafted, the next stage is to actually write. Students should use the parts they have written and write them into a more coherent whole text.
Crucially, this is not the end of the lesson as the next stage involves editing what was written. This often then leads to another writing stage as the final piece is written.
If you’re wondering how this could work with speaking, it could look something like this. A student prepares notes on a topic. They then write some of these notes into whole sentences. The student then tells a partner about the topic. After this they reflect on whether they were able to convey all of the information they wanted to and perhaps re-draft particular sentences. Then they repeat with a new partner.
TBL
Task-based learning (TBL) is another framework that is superior to PPP.
At the core of a TBL lesson is the task, though there are some optional stages that may come first.
A model may be provided for the task, which is typically a recording of two students doing the task. You may also want to highlight key language from the model that can be used when students do the task.
Unless you do either of these stages, the first stage will be the task itself. Like in a TTT lesson, by putting a task early on, you ensure that students get some productive practice and provide an activity from which their true needs can be diagnosed.
After the task, students will report back to the class on how they performed. Before they do this, there is a planning stage for students to discuss what they will say about their performance of the task.
After reporting, the lesson then shifts to a language focus to develop the language needs that arose from their performance of the task and reporting on it. This requires a teacher to be responsive to the language that students produced. It would be odd to see a teacher give an activity on second conditionals here if the students used them accurately in the task and their reporting.
Finally, another similar task could follow (making this cycle similar to that in a TTT lesson) which gives students a chance to put into practice what they learnt.
Summary
The frameworks mentioned and their stages are summarised in the table above.
If you want to do well on CELTA, you will want to get to grips quickly with these different frameworks, what type of lesson they are appropriate for and their stages. At the very least, by the end of a CELTA course, you should not be saying that you are going to use PPP to teach a reading lesson, or some other incompatible combination.
Beyond CELTA
During the CELTA, you will hopefully notice that even though you are being asked to use these lesson frameworks, coursebooks don’t always follow them. You may find that course books omit stages, delay them until a later point, add in additional stages, or seem to be combining them.
The truth is that although these frameworks have been identified as logical ways to structure a coherent lesson, they are by no means the only way to do it.
Another consideration is that when teaching “real” classes, they are rarely 40 or 45 minutes as your CELTA TPs will be. Adult lessons are often anywhere from 90 minutes to 180 minutes (with breaks). Consequently, coursebook writers aim to write longer lesson sequences than 45 minutes which may then combine a skills focus with a grammatical or lexical one.
While you may well end up following a course book a lot of time when teaching, keeping these frameworks in mind will help you to identify what a book is trying to do, what you might want to add, omit or replace and, on the occasion you want to go off-book, plan your own logical sequences.
