February 4

The Whats, Whys and Hows of TEFL

We’re about to start teaching practice with out current part-time course at Active and so were talking about lesson planning and defining aims.  The problem trainees often have is confusion over writing aims and at first they often define aims as the activity they’ll be doing, rather than the linguistic objective.

In my mind, we can think about aims in three ways: the What, Why and How.

WHAT

Here we categorise the aim into Lexical, Grammatical, Phonological or its Skill (Reading, Writing, Listening and Communicative).  Whilst some professionals may argue that there should always be a main communicative aim in our lessons, I disagree – though obviously there should be a communicative focus in our lessons.  However, I think we can do a lot of communicative work around our main aim and we should differentiate between a main Communicative aim, such as creating a roleplay set in a restaurant and communicative activities which practise the main aim, for example a Find Someone Who activity in which learners are practising the present perfect.

WHY

This is the real question – why are you doing this activity?  We can use this to think about main aims, subsidiary aims and stage aims.  Here we often use the infinitive of purpose, with language like:

To review…

To practise…

To introduce…

To revise…

To consolidate…

To extend…

Or in the case of skills:

To scan for…

To listen for…

HOW

This is now where we look at the activities we’re going to be doing.  On the lesson plan templates we use on the course, these ideas would be seen in the “student activity” column.  Here you would find jargon such as gapfill, mingle or board race.

Aims