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.
Comments
ESA lesson plan for large classes
Hi Chala,
Thank you for your comment. I'm so pleased that you like the lesson plan, but it's true that you may need to adapt it slightly for larger classes. For example, in the lead-in stage and the vocabulary focus stage, you could ask your learners to work in small groups of 4 or 5 to discuss their ideas and experiences of dealing with stress, instead of in pairs.
And in the grammar focus stage, after you have drilled a few examples, you could give a 'problem' card to each student and ask them to go around the class and ask 5 different people (not from their group) for advice and then they come back to their group and tell the other members about the best advice they received. Then, you could show the slide with the 'empathy' phrases and repeat the whole class mingling activity, but this time they have a different problem card and have to speak to 5 new people to get advice and really try to focus on showing empathy. Then, when they return to their group, they could comment on which person was the most sympathetic.
I think doing a whole class mingling activity would work better with a large class and could replace the 'writing a dialogue' stage, which could be given as a homework task instead.
I hope that helps!
Jenny
What should I do ESA lesson plan
I am a teacher and teacher educator base in Ethiopia. Currently teaching young university students. I usually follow teachenglish and teachenglishafrica. I found them highly supportive and made the teaching of English more engaging and fun. provisions of hands on lesson plans, PD trainings and others to all levels that are tailored to a specific teaching area make the site more readable. I found this lesson plan working in my class with high engagements and motivation. particularly the steps ESA is really amazing. Thank you.
ESA lesson plan
Hi Teshale,
Thank you so much for your comment. It's great to hear that you have used this lesson plan with your university students and that they found it both engaging and motivating. I hope you will now be able to apply the same ESA steps to your other lessons and it will give you equally positive results.
Jenny
TE team
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.