In this teaching tip you'll find out how best to understand and exploit the materials supplied on the Essential UK part of the site.

What are the Essential UK lesson plans?
The Essential UK lesson plans are designed to be a starting point for conversation classes. They are written for language assistants who are teaching all over the world in many different teaching contexts so you will find that you have to adapt the lessons to be suitable for your group. All the lessons have a connection with the UK so can bring a cultural element into the classroom.

How should I choose a topic?
If you are free to choose the topic yourself try to choose topics that interest you to start with. It’s much easier to give a lesson on something you are interested in and know a little bit about. As you get to know your students, find out what topics they would like to talk about in class. You could do a class survey or questionnaire to find out. If there is nothing in the Essential UK archive for the topic you or your students want to do, use the lesson plans to give you ideas for the sort of activities you can design yourself around the topic.


How should I prepare my lesson using an Essential UK plan?
The Essential UK lesson plans are not designed as ‘ready-made’ lessons which need no preparation or adaptation. Although the classroom materials are downloadable for you, the idea is not to quickly photocopy the materials five minutes before a class and off you go! To get the most out of the lessons you will need to prepare in advance, adapt tasks, cut out some tasks and add some of your own material.

• You can greatly enhance the lessons by bringing some visual aids such as photos or pictures from the internet. Use the web links at the bottom to find some pictures on the iinternet. The downloadable materials generally don’t have any pictures, this is so that they are quick to download and easy to print and copy for everyone, even those teachers working with minimal technology.

• Students will be more involved in the class if you try to localise and personalise the tasks. By this, I mean bringing the topic closer to your students by taking advantage of local issues or of issues which are relevant and interesting for your students. For example, if you choose to do the Essential UK lesson on Cooking and TV Chefs, use the lesson for students to tell you about their favourite local dishes or any celebrity chefs in their country. You could even check this out in advance and bring in photos of the local chefs, or a video clip of them in action. This would certainly involve the students a lot and bring the class to life. It would also show that you want to find out about their culture too.

• When you are preparing your classes, try to visualise the students in action. Think about how you are going to give the instructions to set up an activity type that your students may not have done before. For example, a ‘find somebody who…’ is easier said than done and needs clear and simple instructions in order for students to do it well.

How can I adapt the materials to make them suitable for low levels?
If you look at the task and think you would like to use it, but it’s a bit too difficult for your students you will have to give your students extra support before you start the task. There are many ways to do this – here are some examples:

• Pre-teach new or challenging vocabulary. There are many ways to do this. You could do a simple matching task of words and definitions, or you could put the words on the board and divide up your students to look up a word each in the dictionary. Always go back to the text when you’re pre-teaching so the students will see the word in context. Don’t be over ambitious with the number of new words you pre-teach. Students will probably only be able to take on six or seven in one class

• If you want to do a speaking task such as a class survey or a role-play, add support by leaving useful phrases up on the board so students can have a look if they get stuck

• Do some drilling of key phrases before you start a speaking task. (There are some good ideas for drilling in the Teaching Manual.)

• Offer a demonstration. If you can model a task for your students this will help to give them an idea of what you expect of them. Choose a strong student and show the rest of the class how to carry out the task by giving a clear demonstration with the strong student

• Remember to give simple and clear instructions to low levels

How can I adapt the material to them more challenging for higher levels?
This is an easier problem to deal with, as usually you can push higher levels on to a more challenging task by discussing the topic at more length or in a less-structured way.

• Add extra questions for a reading task or discussion topic or even better, get your stronger students to do this
• In a speaking task write a list of words on the board that you want to ban! For example, ‘nice’ or ‘good’. Tell students you expect them to use more interesting vocabulary at their level
• Record your students speaking. Then let them listen back to themselves and pick out any mistakes or phrases they could improve on. Then repeat the task for students to have the opportunity to put their improvements into practice
• As students are doing speaking tasks, throw in some colloquial expressions that you use yourself. Higher level students can be exposed to a wide range of language and you may decide to focus on some of the expressions you use and explain them as you go along.

For more on adapting materials for mixed ability groups:
http://teachingenglish.org.uk/language-assistant/teaching-tips/adapting-materials-mixed-ability-classes


Where are the reading texts from?
Some of the reading tasks use texts that are written by the British Council’s Trend UK department. If you or your students want to find out more about Trend UK check out this link:
http://www.britishcouncil.org/ism-trenduk.htm

Do I need to photocopy the classroom materials for each student?
The answer to this is probably not. First, select the tasks you want to use. You may have to do some literal cutting and pasting of tasks as you can’t manipulate the pdf files. When you have selected the tasks think about which ones you really need to photocopy. Obviously if you are using a reading text you can’t avoid having to make copies, but if you are doing a classroom survey or a true or false task you may be able to get students to copy the task quickly into their notebooks. A short text or a couple of sentences could also be dictated to the students, as this also extends the task and makes it more challenging. Think before you photocopy and avoid it where at all possible. At the beginning, you may feel safer if you have a pile of papers to give out, but many of the tasks can be achieved just as well without photocopying them – and think of all those trees you’ll save!

I hope this tip has given you some ideas on how to get the most out of the lesson plans. If you are a Language Assistant at the moment please feel free to give feedback on all the material on the website. You can do this by sending a message to the discussion list. If there are any topics you’d like to see in the Essential UK section you can also make a request through the list.

By Jo Budden