What should I do?
Introduction
This lesson follows an ESA (engage–study–activate) teaching approach and aims to introduce new phrases for giving advice and provide learners with personalised speaking activities to practise them. The theme of the lesson is teenage stress and allows learners to discuss its causes and effects as well as suggest practical and effective ways to manage it.
In a typical ESA lesson, teachers first engage the learners in the topic of the lesson – this could be by giving them a discussion question, showing them pictures or telling an anecdote, for example. Next, learners study the target language, perhaps focusing on structure and meaning, and finally learners activate what they have learned by doing a task using the target language.
Lesson outcomes
- To introduce useful phrases for giving advice and making suggestions
- To incorporate new vocabulary for discussing the causes and effects of teenage stress
- To provide personalised speaking activities for learners to practise the target language
- To allow learners to assimilate the target language by writing their own role play
Materials
- Lesson plan
- Student worksheet
- PowerPoint presentation
- Problem cards
Procedure
- Show Slide 2 and ask learners to suggest possible emotions that the person in the image might be feeling. Possible answers are shown on Slide 3.
- Ask learners to work in pairs and talk about three things that have made them feel stressed recently. Then ask them to think together about other typical things that make young people feel stressed (Slide 4).
- Write their ideas on the board. Suggestions might include: too much homework; exams; relationship problems; (cyber)bullying; parental pressure; lack of sleep; phone addiction; high expectations; peer pressure.
- Give learners a copy of the student worksheet to write down any new vocabulary in the first column of the table (causes of stress). Alternatively, they can draw the table in their own notebooks.
- Show Slide 5 and ask learners to think of the possible effects (physical and mental) that stress has on teenagers. Again, they can do this in pairs and write their ideas in the second column of the table on the worksheet.
- Elicit a few ideas from the class and write them on the board.
- Repeat this process a final time to elicit the learners' suggestions for dealing with stress (Slides 6–8). You can compare their ideas with the suggestions on Slide 8 and add any new ones.
Note: If you prefer to show a video to engage your learners more, you can search YouTube for videos related to this topic. Here are a couple of examples:
- Go back to Slide 6 and focus learners' attention on the second speech bubble (I think you should …) and ask them if they know any other words or phrases in English for giving advice. Write any good suggestions on the board before showing the phrases on Slide 9.
- Explain that these six phrases can be divided into two groups according to their grammatical structure: some are followed by an infinitive verb, and some are followed by a gerund.
- Show Slide 10 and tell learners that they are going to listen to you using the phrases and they should try and note which group each phrase belongs to.
- Give out the cut-up problem cards (one per person) and prompt individual learners to read them out by asking What's wrong, [name]? Respond with an 'advice phrase' followed by a piece of advice, and each time you give the advice, ask learners to tell you if it's 'gerund' or 'infinitive'.
Note: If you want to make it easier for them to identify the correct verb form, use the same verb each time, e.g. do/doing.
- After repeating this several times, show learners the answers on Slide 11 and allow time for them to copy the table in their notebooks or on their worksheet.
- Ask learners to tell their partner who they usually speak to when they need advice and why.
- Get feedback from a few people in the class. They might say that the person they talk to depends on the problem, so possible responses could be: friend; boy/girlfriend; sibling; parent, grandparent; teacher; therapist. As for the reason, they might say that person is a good listener and shows empathy as well as giving good advice.
- Show Slide 12 and explain that the phrases in the speech bubbles can be used to show empathy when someone tells you about a problem they're having.
- Explain to learners that they are going to work in pairs to write a short dialogue between two people asking for and giving advice. They can choose any situation/problem, but tell them that they will be asked to 'perform' their dialogue as a role play in front of the class in the next lesson.
- Tell them that they should use Slide 13 as a framework for their dialogue.
- Monitor learners as they write their dialogues and give support as needed, encouraging them to make the exchange as natural as possible.
- Early finishers can practise their role play with their partner and then swap roles.
- Learners can finish writing their dialogues for homework and practise reading or recording them with their partner, ready to act out their role plays in front of the class in the next lesson. You could hold a class vote on who gave the best advice.
- Refer learners to this page on LearnEnglish Teens for extra practice on giving advice. The topic is 'advice for exams' given by a teacher and focuses on using the imperative form.
This is really fantastic format of lesson plan that helps me to teach my students by using different methods. So I love it! But it is may be difficult to implement in large classes.