I would love to share an article that I read with you: In How to Teach English [Longman 1998]by  Jeremy Harmer.

Our students need to be motivated, exposed to the language, and given a chance to see it. Thus Jeremy Harmer proposes the following term to help our students with language acquisition:

ESA: Engage, Study, and Activate

Engage

v     Teachers try to arouse the students’ interest and involve their emotions.

v     Students should feel amused, moved, stimulated, and challenged in order to not feel bored.

v     Recommended activities: games, music, discussions, pictures, and stories.

v     Students should also engage in the topics, exercises, and language- not only games and fun. Example: show a picture and ask students to guess the person’s occupation before listening to that person on tape.

Study

v     Students focus on information or language and how it is constructed. The main focus in this stage is on the construction of language.

v     Activities: practice of sounds, examination and practice of a verb tense, study of a transcript, explanation of grammar, and reading a text or vocabulary.

v     Successful language learning depends on a mixture of subconscious language acquisition (listening and reading) and the list of activities previously mentioned.

Activate

v     Students use language and communicate, they get to try out real language use.

v     Activities: role- plays, debates, discussions, and story writing.

v     If students do not get a chance to activate their knowledge in the class, they might find language use difficult in the real world.

The following is an exercise based on the ESA method:

Identify the ESA in the following:

• Students work in groups. They design their own robot and give a presentation to the class.
• Students and teacher watch a video of modern robots. They describe the robots and say what they like and do not like about them.
• Teacher shows students a particular robot. They are introduced to the words “can” and “can’t”. They practice the forms in sentences. The teacher makes sure that grammar and pronunciation are correct.