Chapter 4: Starting from the Beginning: Planning the Lesson 57
This explanation is an example of poor grading. Logically, if your student
knew both the words ‘bath’ and ‘room’ they would understand ‘bathroom’
without too much trouble, so using these in the explanation doesn’t help
them. The other words like ‘sink’ and ‘mirror’ are even more difficult.A better approach at the right level for your student is to approach bathroom
by starting with ‘house’. Make sure that everyone knows the word by draw-
ing or showing a picture and saying ‘What is it?’ Then divide the picture into
separate areas and teach ‘rooms’. Show a picture of a bathroom or do a mime
of someone taking a shower to teach ‘bathroom’.Good grading influences many things you do in the classroom. You need to
keep grading in mind on a couple of levels:✓ Grading a lesson. To grade a lesson well you need to select new lan-
guage that builds on what students already know. Students should have
sufficient knowledge to grasp the concept. During the lesson too, you
grade by explaining to students how to complete a task using rules,
reminders and examples before actually setting the task. Each task in
the lesson should also be more challenging than the one before it.
✓ Grading the course. You want a logical order within the course sylla-
bus too. This means that the grammar and vocabulary should get more
difficult as you go along and the skills tasks (reading, writing, listen-
ing and speaking) should only include language that has already been
taught or is under consideration in that lesson. So you can’t really teach
the names of ailments before you’ve done the parts of the body. Or, it
doesn’t make sense to teach the past continuous tense before you’ve
done the past simple.
A well-graded lesson starts simply and builds.Within a lesson, it helps to have particular activities for your students to
work on.Say you want your students to write a letter telling their friends back home
about tourist sights in the UK. List what your students need to know in order
to complete the task:✓ Present simple tense
✓ There is/there are
✓ The layout of a letter in English
✓ Expressions such as ‘Dear... ’ and ‘Best wishes’
✓ How to spell the names of the sights
✓ Adjectives for describing places