Lesson Plan of the Day: Engaging Activities and Tasks

• Shiva Rahmani (German) – Wednesday, April 24, 3:00-4:00 in Cobb 201AB
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Language teaching is not always a speaking session. Some calculations even assume that each learner has a maximum of 1-minute talk time per lesson. This makes a maximum of 3.5 hours of talk time in 3 years for 20 learners in the course if the lessons take place 2 hours a week (Schatz 2006, p. 49).

To create a lively class filled with discussions and interaction among students, we need to facilitate the speaking aspect of language teaching.  It is very important to set learning goals at the beginning of each class, and create activities based on it to come up with a sequence. This sequence can be made of many different short or long activities and should eventually lead to a speaking task (Aufgabe) with which the students reach the learning goal of that day. This will act like a simulation in which the students learn to interact with other people in everyday situations.

In this workshop we will look at what good activities (gute Übungen) and what good speaking tasks (gute Aufgaben) are. We will learn how to incorporate them into each lesson plan to tackle the final speaking task and reach the learning goal. It would be very helpful if you can bring your language teaching workbook with you so we can identify these activities and build all a short sequence together.