Chapter 4: Starting from the Beginning: Planning the Lesson 65
✓ Write your interaction patterns into your plans. On your lesson plan,
indicate who is speaking to whom and for how long. Plan TTT (teacher
talking time) for no more than 30 per cent of the lesson time. This helps
maintain a good balance.
✓ Simplify your classroom language. Avoid rambling and overly polite
language. I’m not suggesting that you be rude but it’s far easier for stu-
dents to cope with ‘Open your books to exercise F on page 10 please’,
than ‘If you’re all finished then, we’ll just take a little look at an exercise;
the one on page 10. Yes that’s right, it’s exercise F I think’.
✓ Write up instructions. When you write up instructions on the board
(perhaps while the students are busy doing something else) you don’t
have to repeat yourself later on.
✓ Drawing and miming. Use these techniques to get students describ-
ing what you’re doing so that you don’t have to engage in long
explanations.
✓ Wait patiently for the student to answer. Try not to jump in too soon.
Your students may just get there if you allow them a little more time to
answer the question.
Lesson planning checklist
Use this checklist to make sure that you’re pre-
pared for each lesson.
❑ I know what level my students are at.❑ I know who my students are – their nation-
ality, language, background and so on.
❑ I know how long the lesson is.❑ I set aims and objectives.
❑ What I want to teach fits in with the course
syllabus.❑ I know what my students need to know
about this piece of language – its rules,
patterns and so on.
❑ I have an appropriate context for this lan-
guage point.❑ I anticipated problems and have thought of
ways to prevent them from occurring.
❑ I have a planned activity or exercise for
providing controlled practice.❑ I have a planned activity for providing free
practice.
❑ I have any materials I need.❑ My activities are communicative, which
means the students spend some time inter-
acting with each other to complete a task.
❑ My teacher talking time is 30 per cent or
under.You can find lesson planning templates in
Appendix A.