Lesson Plans

Rachel's lesson plan

• Introduction
  Mention very briefly that something bad happened to me years ago when I was working in a busy restaurant
  
  
• Task
  Write vocab on board: working, waitress, busy, beggar, annoying, customers, push, steak knife, attach, police, grab, phone
  
  
  Pre teaching the difficult words, helping students at each stage...
  
  
• Get students to try and guess what happened that night, using above vocab
  
  
  Roger liked this idea - which then gave the students a reason to read the text
  
  
• Get students to look at the text [see foot of page] - to see if their predictions were correct
  
  
  That wasn't enough, Roger felt. In a proper "language focus" stage the students would underline the verbs and see if they could "notice" the difference between past simple and past continuous. This would get them to observe and then hypothesise about the target language, and then, in the subsequent stages, experiment with it.
  
  
• Then ask sts if any of them has been in any similar situations (keep it light to avoid any really bad experiences)
  
  
• Get them in 2s or 3s to write a short (true or false) story about something similar.
  
  
  In fact, there wasn't sufficient time for this stage. On his observation sheet, Roger noted "Having 'done' the story, [you should have got] them to write it. This would focus them on the grammar (...) before getting them to practise, ie. a 3-stage model, (1) model, (2) analysis, (3) practice" .
  
  It would also have meant that Rachel could have gone round and helped with any difficulties they were still having with the target language.
  
  
• Ask them to share with class
  
  
• Grammar
  Use timelines on board to illustrate how past continuous is used.
  
  
  As Rachel herself observes, "by that time, they were useless... certainly for doing the task"

Teacher's text
Years ago, I was a waitress working in a busy steak restaurant. One evening, I was serving tables when a beggar came in. She started to ask each customer for some money. I saw that she was really annoying the customers so I asked her if she could come back later for something to eat. The beggar was very aggressive and pushed me backwards into the bar. When I stood up she was running at me with a steak knife in her hand. She attacked me but luckily she didn't hurt me because 3 customers grabbed her from behind and knocked her down. While I was phoning the police, my heroes held her tight.