TEACHING GRAMMAR - DIDACTIC SEQUENCE

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DIDACTIC SEQUENCE School: Growing Seeds Teacher: Maysun Eguinoa Course/Level: Year 2, Elementary Number of students: 20 Time: 40 minutes Topic: Talking about the weekend, using past simple tense regular with all persons and forms. PRE TASK The teacher will show two pictures to students:

The teacher will ask students when we say those phrases. She will try to elicit the word weekend. The teacher will write on the board: “at the weekend”, and then she will say: I visit friends at weekends. Then she will ask students “What do you do at weekends?”. The teacher will write students’ answers in the infinitive form in a column on the board (just those verbs that have regular past forms). Then the teacher will say: I watched Game of Thrones on Netflix last weekend. What did you do? The teacher will write student’s answers in the past form on the board, next to the corresponding infinitive form. The teacher will go back to the columns written on the board. She will add all the personal pronouns on the left. Then the teacher will ask students what is different in past verbs in order to elicit the rule for regular verb forms. Board example: At the weekend I You (sg) He She It We You (pl) They

Play videogames Surf the net Chat with friends Visit friends Watch TV/a movie Listen to Music Play football Play the guitar Study

Played videogames Surfed the net Chat with friends Visited friends Watched TV/a movie Listened to music Played football Played the guitar Studied

The teacher will point to the column on the right and ask: Which tense is this? Are we talking about present or past events?

TASK Exercise 1. Students will work in pairs. The teacher will hand in each pair worksheet A and worksheet B. Students will complete the task. Then they will check it with the whole class by reading the answers aloud. (LINK)

Exercise 2. Students will do the following task: I)

Survey Find: a) a boy b) a girl c) a pair of students

Ask them about their weekend and write down the answers (use he/she/they). You can use the following form: Boy - Name: Peter He studied for the exam all the weekend.

II)

Share the results in groups of four and make a list with the top 3 weekend activities.

POST-TASK CHAIN GAME The teacher will start by saying what she did last weekend (just one activity), then a student will repeat what the teacher said and say an activity he/she did last weekend, then, a second student will repeat what the teacher and the first student did last weekend and say what he/she did, and so on. If a student does not remember the whole chain, the other students can give clues by miming the actions. Author: Maysun Eguinoa

ANALYSIS In order to plan this lesson, I based on the Communicative Language Teaching Approach, because it focuses on the communicative function of language paying attention to meaning and fluency, but working on form and accuracy as well. In this approach, activities are developed in a way that enable students to practice communicating in a different way according to their language level. And communication is done through tasks or meaningful activities and through offering context and real life situations, and through several opportunities for interaction. In order to apply this approach, I chose the Presentation Practice and Production method because I do not have experience as a teacher and the lesson is aimed at students having an elementary level of the second language. Thus, for new teachers, this method is better in order to control the content and pace of the lesson. Therefore, the pre-task involves the presentation of the topic and the content of the lesson. Then, in the task stage, students do meaningful activities because they imply finding out information they do not have, they imply interaction, they simulate a real life conversation and they include giving real and personal information. Thus, here the students develop the practice and production stages, where students write and speak, giving them time to reflect on and process the new grammatical items being dealt with, and giving the opportunity to interact orally seeking for fluency. Here is where the teacher can observe students’ performance and give feedback in order for them to achieve accuracy. The lesson ends with a game that serves as a drilling activity, in order for students to repeat the new grammatical items learnt in the lesson. Nonetheless, I consider it important for the teacher not to be in complete control of the lesson and not to provide all the vocabulary and grammatical rules directly, but to to elicit vocabulary and meaning from students. That is why I chose to use the inductive way of teaching grammar. That is why the examples used are first elicited from students, and then they are asked questions in order to convey meaning and rules. They will reflect on the questions and arrive at the following conclusions: we are talking about past events/activities in the past; this is how words change when we write them in the past form.