Essay on Gaining Language Skills for Personal and Community Growth Through ESL

Teaching English as a second language offers students the chance of gaining the necessary skills and knowledge to enhance their personal growth and participation in the community (Wan, 2017, p.13). Wan adds that it enables secondary English students to improve their reading and writing skills to enjoy using the language. From previous research on linguistics, especially in learning English as a second language, the English language enables a learner to acquire a specific order of the vocabularies even if it is different from others (Allwright, 2005). This paper prepares a lesson plan of four hours that seeks to teach grammar and writing, with some vocabularies and color idioms to help in the preparation of my students for the government exam. The teaching methods that will be used in my unit include the task-based approach and communicative approach.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

This unit will allow both the teacher (me) and my students to gain the necessary English grammar content and writing skills effectively. It also offers the students the opportunity to analyze the intricate parts of grammar and to understand the different styles used by different people worldwide. The unit is very appropriate since I will be teaching non-native English students (Arab students) aged seventeen at a secondary international school in Jordan. Their primary language of communication is Arabic.

The aim of learning English vocabulary and grammar is to help them prepare for the incoming government exam that will offer them a chance in the university. This government exam is essential, and crucial to both students and teachers as it is the last step in their secondary education and the first step in their university education. Different elite and experienced teachers write this government exam, and it focuses on grammar, reading, and writing in English. Therefore, my main focus in this unit will be teaching the students grammar, vocabularies, writing, and some color idioms. I will also practically apply my theoretical experiences. The resources available are the English course book, online materials, group discussions, charts, articles, and teacher's guide book. The total number of students are twenty.

In the four hours assigned, I'll start by teaching the students how to write English sentences by asking them to write an essay using correct grammatical structures. The essay topic will be "English Grammar Rules and Usage." I chose the topic since this would be the first time for all of them to write an English essay and the topic condenses all the reading and vocabulary that I will be teaching. This will make the work easier and cover more ground in a short time. While writing the essay, I'll teach them different grammars and vocabularies and showing them where to apply them appropriately. These grammar parts include the simple past tense and present perfect tense.

Furthermore, I will guide my students using the different color idioms. The students will form two groups, each having different colored cards. Each student will write a sentence with a color idiom depending on which they chose, while the other students in the group will say the meaning. Color idioms include out of the blue, which means without warning, black sheep, which means to be the outcast and green with envy which means to be very jealous. After that, I will help the students to write correct verbs and change sentences from simple past to present perfect tense using appropriate keywords.

As per the government exam requirements, I will help them to identify different American and British English words. I will then teach them how to rewrite the American English words to British English words and vice versa. Next to that, I will teach them easy hints of converting words from either American English or British English. To further enable them to answer the government exam questions, I will give them questions from previous government exams that are related to the unit am teaching.

Grammar involves describing language structure to form sentences, and these sentences should be meaningful and functional. Learning grammar involves three processes; noticing, restructuring, and integrating the current structure into use. In noticing stage, students should be aware of English as a second language has different sentence structures compared to their language. Therefore, the teacher has to present his/her grammar very clearly so the students can know the difference. Restructuring stage enables a student to form new structures of their understanding of the language. After restructuring the new language, they need to understand how the restructured language works, and they can be able to use it without problems (Ellis, 2002).

Writing involves expressing meanings, ideas, and range of features with appropriate vocabularies and grammar on paper. It demands a lot of effort for English non-natives to achieve fluency. I will use dictologloss to help me achieve this technique for my students. Dictogloss is a dictation activity that involves multiple skills such as listening, writing and speaking and promotes a focus on form (Nabei, 1996). According to Harmer (2015), its purpose is for students "to reconstruct a text from memory" (p. 380). In contrast to regular dictations, the learners only start writing once the dictation is finished. They try to remember and recreate the exact wording of what they have heard. The learners will work together in groups and try to recreate the full text. Finally, they compare their recreated text with the original, noticing differences in the process.

Classroom instruction contributes majorly in learning vocabularies to second language learners. According to Nation (2007), vocabulary is sometimes put in passive and productive words, and the critical parts of vocabulary knowledge are receptive and productive knowledge. The easiest ways to remember vocabularies includes remembering phonologies and associating sound with known words.

Objectives

The unit aims to cover simple past tense and present perfect tense, and the student should be able to use and explain these tenses correctly.

Teach the students and make sure they understand the vocabularies related such as keywords by reading a passage.

Teach the students how to understand and apply different color idioms that are mentioned in the government exam material, and enable them to apply them appropriately.

Teaching the students how to write an essay with correct grammatical sentences, structures and word vocabularies.

Syllabus Grid

The teacher and students must have a clear idea of what writing and grammar entails. One should be able to transfer the concepts and principles from one field to another (Jessner, 2019). For this unit, here is the syllabus grid that I will use while teaching it for the four hours assigned.

Grammar

Understand tenses and their uses by demonstrating and using the Present perfect tense, and simple past tense

Vocabulary

Apply correct vocabularies in various contexts

Understand the use of different vocabularies and enrich with more vocabularies, for example by reading passage and choose some verb related to the past tense. such as "managed "

Writing Skills

Form sentences with active sentence structures and word choice

Organize ideas into texts and sentences

Write academic essays appropriately.

Culture

Observe originality of work and avoid plagiarism at all costs

Task and Activities

Note-taking

Academic essay writing

Answer open-ended questions

Puzzles and multiple-choice questions

Competencies

Reading, writng, spelling.

Participatory Process

Group learning of color idioms.

Learning Strategies

Answer previous government exam that related to the unit and help the student to understand the way and the nature of the questions in the exam. Also give the students exercises similar to government exam

Give hints on how to change from American English to British English and verse vice. For example, American English mostly uses simple past. (He got a new car) while British English uses present perfect (He has gotten a new car)

References

Allwright, D. (2005). From teaching points to learning opportunities and beyond. TESOL Quarterly, 39(1), 9-3

Ellis, R. (2002). Accuracy and fluency revisited. In Hinkel, E. & Fotos, S. (Eds.), New perspectives on grammar teaching in second language classrooms (pp. 35-50). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Harmer, J. (2015). The practice of English language teaching. London: Longman.

Jessner, U., & Cenoz, J. (2019). Teaching English as a third language. Second Handbook of English Language Teaching, 1-18.

Nation, I.S.P. (2007). The four strands. Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching, 1(1), 2-30.

Richards, J.C. (2001). Curriculum development in language teaching (pp. 128-138). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tomlinson, B. (2003). Developing principled frameworks for materials development. In B.Tomlinson (Ed.), Developing materials for language teachers (pp. 110-121). London: Continuum.

Wan, Y. S. (2017). Drama in Teaching English as a Second Language- A Communicative Approach. The English Teacher, 13.