Everyone in EFL wings it from time to time. You didn’t have time to prepare or even think about your lesson, so you go in with the textbook and a cassette or a bunch of photocopies and fly by the seat of yer pants. With experience, you’ll even have some lessons so internalised that you can teach them, and maybe only need the whiteboard and a pen. Maybe not even those…

Be careful not to become a career winger though! In my opinion this is when you keep rolling out activity based lessons day after day.<> This term sometimes refers to a lesson where, although each task or activity could be said to have value in it’s own right, they don’t really connect together to give your students the means to communicate effectively. Often there is nothing you could point to at the end of the lesson that your students can do which they couldn’t do before your lesson started, or at least nothing really useful in a real world situation. Remember that the activities in textbooks if followed sequentially will not give you a proper lesson plan, but rather just an activity based lesson with no real end product. Lots of teachers do this and have become career wingers, especially in countries where the DoS is not all over you like a rash and the audience - students/school managers are pretty uncritical.

I remember a story from years back. A teacher who’d been observed, went to a feedback session with the DoS. The conversation went like this:

DoS: That was an activity-based lesson, wasn’t it?

Teacher: (not really knowing what this term meant) Er, yeah! I suppose so!

DoS: (quick as a flash) Cos it wasn’t a language based one, was it?

Priceless! Most activities have some kind of pedagogical worth! The questions are, what is the relationship between the different activities you do in the hour? Does each task build meaningfully/productively on the last? Also how many of them are truly interactive/communicative?

For all new TEFlers out there, one of the hardest parts of our job is making sure the build up (presentation & practice of new language) doesn’t take up the full hour. The best thing you can do in your free time is get yourself copies of the Inside Out / Reward resource packs at all levels also the NEF teachers’ books again at all levels and get swipin’ and laminating those cut up communicative activities. Stick ‘em in little bags with a sticker on indicating which language point they are intended to activate. Another thing is to bother your students mercilessly until they use English when they compare each other’s answers in any kind of exercise. Give them the phrases they need on a sheet of paper and really dose up the “well done!s” when they use the phrases.

Forbid the use of the mother tongue like you’re a tyrant and most of all, put yourself in the position of a student and try to imagine how interesting your lesson would be to you! Try to keep the bookwork and the TTT down and lose your fear about how much of the book you’ve got to cover in what period of time.

One more thing is this. Get together with other teachers for a TDS session where the title is: How to mine a one hour lesson out of a unit in a textbook. What should we use and what should we ignore? In my opinion, our choices are:

Vocabulary & Speaking

Grammar structure(s) & Speaking

Vocab/Grammar Structure & Speaking

Listening & Speaking

Reading & Speaking etc, etc

Geddit? Everything should lead to speaking unless your class is specially devoted to one of the other skills e.g. Writing.