78 Part II: Putting Your Lesson Together
You can use concept check questions such as:
✓ Do fish live in puddles? Why not?
✓ Give me an example of a famous lake? (For example, Garda, Michigan,
Windermere.) Is there one in your country? How big is it?
✓ Why are ponds, lakes and puddles similar?
✓ If you break a big bottle of wine what do see on the kitchen floor?
Show pertinent pictures and get descriptions from individual students.
Encourage them to use the adjectives already on the board.
Sharing function and connotation
When you explain vocabulary or grammar, you generally need to show how
people use it. It’s easy with some words. For example, tall is a word for things
or people of great height. However, some phrases and grammar are more
open to interpretation. Take the word cheers. It has several uses – you say it
while clinking glasses before you drink, you use it informally to express grati-
tude and it’s associated with happiness too (cheer, cheerful).
Filling in students on functions
When you teach language according to the situation you need it for, this is
called a functional approach. If you take a functional approach to teaching,
you usually introduce the setting before you introduce the new piece of lan-
guage. I talk about using a functional/notional syllabus in Chapter 19.
So, if you’re teaching cheers, you can design a lesson about going to the pub,
and teach:
✓ What are you having?
✓ I’ll have a pint/glass of...
✓ Whose round is it?
✓ It’s my round
✓ Bottoms up!
You focus not on the grammatical structures but simply on what you say in
this particular context.
Even if you take a structural approach to the lesson, meaning that you teach
particular grammar, you still need to show very clearly how a word or phrase
is actually used in realistic situations.
