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Example Lesson Plan: Advanced ESL

Danielle Pedersen

• 5 min read

Instructional Focus

As an instructor, I will be focusing this unit on pronunciation - specifically looking at aspects of stress in the beginning, followed by lax vowels (juxtaposed against their tense counterparts), and finishing with working on reductions.  The stress portion will aim at having students being able to identify which syllables are stressed, first in single word contexts, and then in short sentences.  Producing correct stress will not be a major focus - only identifying correctly, and potentially predicting.  The lax vowels section will first focus on identifying lax vowels as opposed to their tense counterparts - minimal pairs identification, largely.  Though identifying will take less time than the follow up section of correct production of these sounds.  The instructions will therefore include talking about the mechanics of producing these sounds - what is happening technically and phonetically with one’s mouth to make the vowels, with exercises in differentiating and producing these sounds.  In the aim of bringing the prior mentioned two focuses together, a unit of reductions will be implemented - a short section on identifying what a reduction is, and reviewing some common reductions, and then wrapping up with a focus on producing reductions correctly.


Instructional Context

For this unit, the target class will consist of 15 students of varying ages within the range of 25 to 40.  Their proficiency in English (specifically in listening and speaking) will be high/advanced, as they will retain and understand about 90% of what is said to them in an instructional context and be able to reply coherently and with accurate grammar.  These will be learners who aim to earn doctorate degrees at a university in which classes are taught in English - they will say that their goal is to “be completely fluent” or to “sound like a native” as well as being able to understand native speaker rapid speech.  As an instructor, the course will then focusing largely on specific aspects of pronunciation that native speakers acquire through exposure, and learners are not normally taught in EFL classes; additionally, rapid speech  listening comprehension will also be a goal as a result of students’ desires to be able to be fully immersed in the university environment.  As a strength, these students will be incredibly motivated and hard-working, as they are learning English for their own personal goals and are not required in any sense to accomplish the task.  However, these students will also be constantly busy with other aspects of their educations and careers.  This may cause the inability to complete extraneous assignments outside of class, or even tardiness and absence due to other obligations.

The course will be taught in a classroom at a public university - an ESL setting.  The course is not required by any of the students’ departments.  The students will be expected to function proficiently in their academic environments, which includes classrooms and listening to complex lectures, as well as interacting with classmates and professors.  This may also include, for many students, lab-work settings and an intimate knowledge of the language used in these contexts, as well as how to be communicatively adequate with their coworkers.


Teacher and Student Roles

As an instructor, I will be providing the foundational information of the target pronunciation units to the students.  I will provide notes and PowerPoints of every lesson, which will act as a summary for each class for students to review beforehand or after class.  I will explain any further questions students may have about the given topics, or be able to clarify confusion after any topic as been introduced.  I will encourage students and correct students along with any practice or review work regarding each lesson, and solidify the new knowledge in each student’s mind.

Students will be expected to participate in class - both asking any questions they may have to ask for clarification, and participation during oral practice that involves speaking.  Students will be expected to pay attention to any lecture portion of the lessons, taking notes as they deem necessary, and afterwards completing the review work or practice assignments that correspond to the lesson to the best of their ability (still asking questions as they need).  Classes will be divided between lecture portions and active participation segments and students will be expected to participate appropriately in each fragment - listening, note taking for one and active participation and full effort to solve problems in the other.


Goals and Objectives

Over this unit, students will learn about specific aspects of pronunciation.  By the end of the unit, students will be familiar with stress, lax vowels, and reductions.  Both identifying correct uses of these facets of pronunciation and production of reductions will be achieved.  Students will leave feeling comfortable in their improved comprehension abilities as well as being much closer to their personal goals of “sounding native.”

My objectives for specific lesson plans are as follows:

  1. Stress: this lesson plan will focus on what stress is in technical terms, and the class will delve into learning the patterns of stress that happen in English words commonly.  By the end of this class, students will be able to correctly identify which syllable is stressed when select common words are spoken aloud by native English speakers.
  2. Stress part 2: Here, more complicated stress patterns of basic sentences will be looked at to elaborate on the stress patterns that were introduced the day before.  We will work then on correctly predicting stress.  By the end of this class, students will be able to correctly predict where stress will happen on a word-by-word basis, as well as within basic sentences.
  3. Introduction to lax vowels: This lesson will be focused on familiarizing students with the idea of tense and lax vowels.  The beginning will be a simple introduction of the IPA symbols that represent each of these different sounds (with applicable word examples of each tense and lax vowel pair, such as “each” and “itch”).   This will transition into explaining the mechanics of what is happening phonetically to produce the different sounds.  By the end of this lesson, students will be able to differentiate between which written words would be pronounced using lax or tense vowels.
  4. Continuation of lax vowels: This class will focus largely on listening skills and comprehension and by the end students will be able to differentiate in minimal pair contexts whether the vowel being used is tense or lax.  We will also work on identifying these vowels in natural speech, using listening activities that involve videos and transcripts wherein students will have to mark for tense and lax vowels.
  5. Final lax vowels: This class will bring back the information introduced about the mechanics of what is happening phonetically to produce these sounds.  By the end of the class, students will be able to explain what is happening to produce lax vowels, and they will be able to produce tense and lax vowel counterparts accurately.
  6. Reductions: In this class, students will learn why reductions happen and the basic form and patterns that apply to reductions.  By the end of class students will be able to correctly produce reductions as well as predict phrases and words that would be reduced.


Selecting and Adapting Materials and Activities

PowerPoints will be used to provide the instructional foundation and the necessary information.  The slides will be concise and straight to the point, and they can be distributed to the students before class has started to give everyone a chance to review the material before entering class.  This will be effective for the students who want to review the material on their own time and be familiar with the lessons before class has started.  For PowerPoint examples, see sources at the end.

For the first lesson plan on stress, a worksheet with a list of multisyllabic words will be given to students.  Using the common patterns of stress that they will have learned, they will have to predict where stress will happen in each of the words.  See resource A for worksheet.  The following day will involve student produced materials and will not require external resources, besides the normal PowerPoint information on stress patterns in sentences.

Working into lax vowels, the lecture notes in the PowerPoint would include diagrams that show the different mouth positions that produce each of the different sounds, as well as the basic information such as close versus open, high to low, front to bad, and tense or lax.