Episode Twenty-eight

How to Write Lesson Aims (and Why They Matter)

Show Notes

"By the end of the lesson, students will be able to..."

Does the phrase above look familiar? If you're a teacher, chances are you're aware of the practice of writing aims or objectives for your lessons. Maybe you learned about this in a training course, or maybe you work at a language school where your boss looks over your lesson plans. For many teachers, sitting down to write out lesson aims can feel a little like a pointless chore. If you have a sense of what you want to do in the lesson, do you really need to write it all out? Is the wording REALLY that important? In this episode, we talk all about lesson aims and why they're actually a lot more important than you might think. We'll give you some tips for making them count, tell you exactly how to determine the right main and sub aim for different types of lessons, and discuss why having a clear aim is the main thing that can make or break your lesson.

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In this Episode

Main Aims

• What lesson aims are

• Why lesson aims are actually for the students, not for you

• How to write your aims from the students’ perspective

• Why we say, “By the END of the lesson…”

• Why adding “better” to your aims makes them more achievable

• SWBAT

• Why lesson aims matter: how a lesson aim is like taking a taxi to the airport

• How the lesson type determines the lesson aim

• An example of how to word an aim for a reading lesson

• How detailed to be in the wording of your aims - you can even mention the specific sub-skills students will practice

• An example of how to word an aim for a speaking or writing lesson

• An example of how to word a grammar or vocabulary lesson aim

• Why the wording of your main aim matters- how this can make your aim achievable or not

• Why the aim should be focused on the use of language, not just the knowledge of language

Subsidiary Aims

• Why your sub aim should focus on a different skill or system than your main aim

• Example sub aims for a reading lesson

• How many sub aims you should include in a lesson, depending on the length

• Why the sub aim you choose determines how you spend time in your lesson (after the main aim has been achieved!)

• Why the sub aim is about something incidental that students will also gain in the course of a lesson

• Why the aims determine what you extend or cut in your lesson to manage your timing

Choosing Lesson Aims

• Why the main and sub aims need to be different

• Why it’s not common (and probably not a good idea) to have a systems (grammar or vocabulary) main and and a systems sub aim

• A good trick for determining your sub aim in a grammar or vocabulary lesson

Stage Aims

• Where to review the lesson stages: stages in general, for reading lessons, for listening lessons, for speaking lessons, or for writing lessons

• Why you need stage aims in each lesson

• How stage aims help you determine which activities actually belong in your lesson

• An interesting way to think about timing and the value of activities in your lesson: is an activity “too expensive?”

• How every stage in the lesson needs to contribute to achieving your main aim

• Why aims are important even when you aren’t being evaluated as a teacher

Aims Achievement in General

• The problem with having a mentality of “Oh, I’ll just finish whatever we don’t get to today in the next class”

• Why an amazing activity idea doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a perfect activity for THAT spot in THAT lesson

• Frameworks: how more structure can actually be freeing

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Get our free Aims Writing chart! It’s a clear, helpful guide for choosing and wording main aims depending on the lesson type. Download it and print it for an easy reference when planning your lessons.

Episode Twenty-two

How to Teach Listening 2: Different Sub-Skills and WHy They Matter

Show Notes

In this episode, we're going into even more depth on how to teach effective listening lessons. First, we talk about different ways we listen in real life and how we can apply this to our listening lessons in the classroom. Then we go over the different listening "sub-skills," why the distinction between them matters, and examples of how you can help students practice each one. Finally, we offer some suggestions for taking listening tasks to the next level, and answer some common questions (should you give students the transcript?) along the way.

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In this Episode

• Listening as a skill- just any listening doesn’t necessarily count as true listening comprehension practice!

• Why it’s important to practice listening in the classroom

• Creating a bridge between the classroom and real life listening

• Why we listen to different types of audio in different ways, and how this applies to listening lessons

• Three different listening “sub-skills” and how these compare to the reading sub-skills we discussed in this episode

• How to choose which types of listening comprehension or sub-skills to have students practice- why the audio text itself determines this

  Listening for gist

• How to set up a listening for gist task when you can’t make students “skim” listen

• How to set a task that helps students practice listening for the main idea

• Examples of listening for gist tasks

  Listening for specific information

• How to identify what “specific information” is in a text

• What listening for specific information requires of students - how it’s different from listening for gist

• Examples of specific information tasks

  Listening for detail

• How this is different from listening for specific information and how to tell the two sub-skills apart

• Why it’s helpful to let students listen for gist before asking them to listen for detail

• Why practicing this sub-skill usually requires playing the audio multiple times

• Why it’s ok if students don’t get all the answers right the first time around

• A good strategy for going over the answers to listening for detail tasks

• Examples of listening for detail tasks

  More advice for teaching listening

• Why it’s not important for students to understand every single word in a text - it’s about the process, not the final result!

• What else you can do with an audio text, after you’ve already gone through tasks to practice listening for gist, specific information and detail

• How to help students understand connected speech

• A situation in which you can use the transcript

• A specific example of a complete listening lesson - including an exercise in which students practice listening to connected speech

• Why students need to be comfortable with the content of the audio before you give them an exercise on connected speech

• What to do if students continue to have trouble with the detailed listening task

• How to help students use logic and knowledge of context to help them understand what they might have missed in their comprehension

• Our shameless plea to review us on Apple Podcasts

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Episode Ten

Six More Grammar Lesson Tips: Advice on Planning and Resources

Show Notes

In episode eight, we brought you six actionable tips for teaching grammar lessons. Now we’re taking it all the way back to the planning stage to help you structure a successful grammar lesson from the ground up. We’ve got six more of our best, most practical tips for you- this time focused exclusively around how to plan your lesson from start to finish and how to find and use the resources you need. We’re covering everything from effective lesson structure to our favorite reference books. And we share our strategies for how to look at a course book and know exactly what to keep and what to cut.

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In this Episode

• Tip #1: Use a lesson framework. A framework is a set pattern of activities you can use to structure your lesson. It’s an essential outline that will guide your students through the lesson and ensure your main aim is achieved. Head over to the blog post on frameworks for more in-depth information.

• Tip #2: Use the course book as a jumping off point for grammar research. Did you know most course books have a “grammar bank” in the back? The grammar bank provides a clear explanation of exactly what your students need to know about the target grammar- already curated and simplified for you.

• Tip #3: Teach a lot about a little, not a little about a lot. Focus is key. Make sure you’re narrowing your focus to a digestible amount of material for your students (and for yourself!) to ensure that the students walk away really being able to use a small amount of new language, rather than still feeling confused about the ten different things you tried to teach at once.

• Tip #4: Extra time? Add more activities, not more information. Avoid the temptation to bring in new language or material near the end of your lesson. Students will benefit much more from additional opportunities to practice what they’ve just learned rather than having to completely shift their focus and try to grasp brand new information in the last fifteen minutes of class.

• Tip #5: Adapt, adapt, adapt! Take ownership of your material and be proactive in making sure it does exactly what you wan it to do. If you’re using a course book, take the exercises you want, cut the ones you don’t, and change any activity to ensure it helps streamline your lesson. Want to know what this looks like in practice? Register below for our free video training on exactly how to adapt course book material.

• Tip #6: Use the right resources. Here are a few of our favorites that we mention in this episode:

• Our online grammar course: Be Your Own Grammar Guru

• Grammar reference books, especially Teaching Tenses by Rosemary Aitken and Understanding and Using English Grammar by Betty Azar (plus more recommendations).

• Upcoming webinars on how to teach grammar

• Podcast Episode 8: Our Top Six Tips for Teaching Grammar Lessons and Podcast Episode 2: Five Misconceptions About Teaching Grammar

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Want to know exactly how these planning tips work in practice? Watch our free video workshop in which we show you how to take a page straight out of a course book and make it into a streamlined, communicative grammar lesson.

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Did you find these tips useful? Do you have questions about planning and teaching grammar? Let us know!

We’d love to hear your comments below. And if you enjoyed this episode, we’d be extremely grateful if you share it on your social media or subscribe here on iTunes and leave us a review. Your support means so much to us! For more teaching tips delivered straight to your inbox, sign up for our weekly newsletter.