Chapter 2 – How long is the lesson?

Beginning

o If you feel that first impressions are very important and also want to have your attention free once
the students arrive, you may well start your own work BEFORE the beginning of the lesson. You´ll
get into the classroom before the students do.
o Regardless of when you get into the classroom, whether you show up half an hour early or slide in
dead on time, there is still, theoretically, the choice of whether to respect the time boundary at the
start of class accurately or to have instead a fluid, organic start.

Clear boundaries

You´ll probably do some of the following:

- engage the students in eye contact

- shake hands
- ask students to stand up
- shut the door
- greet the class and expect a greeting in return
- call the register
- have a procedure for late students
- introduce yourself and the first activity

If you want students to be punctual, you need to be so yourself.

Fluid boundaries

In some institutional settings, the feeling may be that time boundaries can be more fluid and organic.

The sort of students you teach will greatly affect the way you begin class too. With primary and secondary
students, brisk control of energy and enthusiasm will be necessary. If you are working with busy students
who are highly motivated and paying for themselves, then saunter in ‘organically’ at your peril! They will
think you lazy and unprofessional.

Working starts

If you are on a tight schedule and keen to create a time-efficient working atmosphere, then you are likely
to get cracking on administrative tasks such as having students hand in their homework, checking past
homework, calling roll or asking students to get out certain books. You may well socialise later in the lesson
but may need to have the feeling that a substantial body of work has been completed satisfactorily before
things can lighten up. Other possible starts are:

- linking back to a past lesson to review things

- explaining the aim of the current lesson and how it fits into the lesson and course
- zooming in immediately on the main work of the lesson
Taking care of the atmosphere

o students come to class from different places and are only together for class once a week, and so
need time to gel.
o the time of day too will influence the atmosphere
o class atmosphere can change from day to day, even with the same class and the same teacher for
no apparent reason, though there may be links to the weather, time of the year, etc. Some teacher
will respond to these outside influences by always doing the same things at the start of class trying
to induce a working mood out of association and habit
o Other will vary their lesson starts from day to day
o If you like students to be quiet and concentrated, you might say, ‘With your eyes shut, listen to the
sounds and name them mentally in English’ or do some guided visualization exercises.
o The concentration involved quietens the students and as they come closer to the centre of their
spiral they focus more on the here and now.
o If you like student to be lively and eager to participate, you may tend to choose team games as
starters.
o If you need to make a friendly atmosphere, you will tend to socialise, asking students how they got
on in the last lesson or whether they have been watching the sport recently.

Student starts

o fundamental idea: students are encouraged to take responsibility for their own learning and for
some classroom processes without always needing the teacher to ‘crank start’ them.
o example: if you told your students the topic of the lesson and asked them to recall individually, in
pairs or in groups, in note form on paper, everything they know about the topic.
o students can start class not just by taking over administrative tasks such as collecting homework
and bringing it to the front desk. They can also:
 start greeting their neighbours and asking them questions in English at the sight
of the teacher in the doorway
 give their neighbours an oral summary of something read for homework
 test their neighbours on a list of words from the last lesson
 prepare six to ten review questions to ask the whole class

Some student groups are so lively and cohesive that they will start classes on their own without being
prompted or primed by the teacher. I have known students to start class by:

- singing ‘Happy Birthday’

- lighting candles and turning the electric lights off
- turning up en masse 20 minutes late on April Fool´s Day
- engaging the teacher in a passionate debate on the stupidity of the English
- telling each other personal or international news
- showing photographs and commenting on them in English
Discussing the menu

o you can do this by writing a list of planned activities on the same part of the board each day,
perhaps the top left-hand corner.
o you can list some areas of work and let students decide which order they want to do things in,
which things they would like to cross off or add to the list and what personal goals they would like
to set for the lesson, week or term.
o In order for students to make reasoned choices from your menu they will need information, so you
may have to give them a ‘preview’.
o You will always have to explain the choices in some way. It´s helpful to put notes or mnemonics on
the board as you are explaining choices.
o Theoretically the most open choice for students is to be asked ‘What shall we do today?’
o Using menu starts is not just a way of building learner autonomy, it also gives a sense of structure
and progress, keeps you relevant, and inspires confidence in you as a teacher wh o knows what
you´re doing.
o The sooner you work out what is comfortable in your setting for you and your students, the sooner
you can take your lesson starts more for granted and stop planning them in so much detail.

Middles

Three possible categories of ideas for these middle sections. These are Threads, Middles as stimulus-based
blocks, and Generalisable procedures for texts.

Threads

o ‘little and often’ is the best way to learn

o it’s better to work for a short spell on something, leave it to settle or percolate for a while and then
pick it up next time, reviewing and extending understanding a little before leaving it again.

An animal a day: simple thread idea. This series of activities is designed to work on literal and
metaphorical uses of basic vocabulary. The ‘animal’ can be a cat, fish, etc. The first day, one animal
is introduced with its basic vocabulary, e.g. a cat: whiskers, paws, tails. When the thread is revisited
in the next class these words are reviewed and new ones added, e.g. tabby, tom kitten. Your choices
each time you revisit the animal in subsequent classes are to:
 review nouns already learned
 add verbs (hiss, scratch, purr)
 add adjectives (furry, soft, playful)
 add strengths and weaknesses (good hunter, kills things, sleeps a lot)
 add metaphors (cat’s eyes in the middle of the road, a catty remark, etc)
 introduce new ‘animals’ such as birds and snails, discuss the similarities in what
they have and where they live
 ask students to tell about individual animals of one type that they have known
o can last from 5-20 minutes and can be visited either every class or regularly but at longer
intervals. Once students have started work on this thread they will quickly settle into it each
time you announce ‘OK, let’s go back to our animal a day’. Once introduced, threads can
 be picked up quickly with a minimum of explanation since they are already familiar to
everyone.
o There are many different kinds of threads for speaking, listening, vocabulary, writing,
thinking and learning general knowledge.
o These threads do not necessarily have a connection to other activities in the same class
(vertically) but do with activities in subsequent classes (horizontally).
o minimize planning time
o For other classes who need more in-depth work, a combination of a block and thread
approach will work well.

Stimulus-based blocks

Another way of looking at the time between the beginning and end of a lesson is as one big block of time
that you can use to get a lot of work done on one thing. You may use this ‘block’ approach with well -
motivated students who can concentrate for long periods.

A stimulus is anything that has the capacity to hold student interest. Thus some example stimuli are a page
in a textbook, a listening tape, an object, a visitor, a drawing on the blackboard or a song.

You can apply different kinds of move to a stimulus. By this I mean a way of working with a chosen stimulus.
Example categories of move are:

 meeting the stimulus: this stage is when students first encounter the stimulus. Sometimes you will
want this to happen immediately for the sake of impact or when the stimulus is extremely rich.
However, it can be more productive at other times not to display all the material immediately. Not
revealing the stimulus immediately will mean that students can learn language for prediction and
speculation, matching, sorting and reordering.
 analysis: involves studying the stimulus to see what is in it once it has been totally revealed or
pieced together. Examples of analysing activities are where students comment on the stimulus and
compare it with their speculations, or where students identify and name its parts, describe it and
discuss its natural context and uses, and its past, present and future.
 personalisation: you can make the stimulus more meaningful and interesting and thus more
memorable to students by establishing a link between the students and the stimulus. In this stage,
students can write or speak about how the stimulus is similar or different from them, what the
stimulus reminds them of, if they have ever… This encourages oral and written expression of the
students´ own experience.
 alteration and transfer: encourage them to work with the material flexibly, thus improving thinking
and language skills. Options here are making new things from the stimulus, reducing or expanding
it, thinking of parallels, opposites or reversals.
 creation: the students move on from the stimulus, using it as a springboard to a new skill or new
products. Example activities are role plays or letter writing connected with the stimulus.

In stimulus-based teaching, you can go through all of these moves with one stimulus in one lesson. In this
way you and your students will work with the stimulus in a very through and sustained way. You can use
different moves with different stimuli depending on which ones the stimuli seem to lend themselves to best.
They don´t have to be done in a fixed order. They don´t all have to be used each time. The five categories
of moves are ‘generalisable procedures’ which, once you have tried them out and learned how to do them,
can be applied to any stimulus at all for the rest of your teaching life.

Generalisable procedures for texts

Maley gives 12 generalisable procedures that he suggests can be applied to short texts. The procedures
are:

1. Expansion: we can add, say, adverbs to this text or sentences before, after or within it, or comments
within it, or new characters to it.
2. Reduction: we can shorten the text by removing specified items, turning it into note form or
combining parts of it.
3. Media transfer: we can transfer the message into pictures, maps, graphs, or into a poem, a headline,
an advertising slogan, etc.
4. Matching: we can find a correspondence between the text and a title, a visual, another text or some
music.
5. Selection and ranking: who would be most likely to say the one liner, e.g. a car mechanic, a school
teacher or a conjurer?
6. Comparison and contrast
7. Reconstruction: when jumbled up, sentences can be surprisingly difficult to put back together.
8. Reformulation: rewrite the one liner as a newspaper headline, poem, recipe or bible story.
9. Interpretation: discuss what the text really means.
10. Creation: use the text as a kind of template for making others.
11. Analysis: analyse the text.
12. Project work

Break time

Rounding off

Rounding off activities come as a welcome rest from periods of intense concentration. They signal the end
of a chunk of work and can be used to review what´s just been done. Some ideas are:

- scramble the letters of the word on the blackboard in anagram form. See if students can
unscramble the letters to find the original word and the see if they can make funnier anagrams.
- see how many new words they can make from the old one using each letter only once.
- see how many connected words they can build onto the letters of your chosen word.
- ask the students to tell you one thing they have understood, one thing they haven’t and one thing
they found interesting or surprising in the work just done.
- ask the students to write down four new words they think they will forget.
- tell the students what is coming up in the next part of the lesson and ask them what they know
about it already.
Complete break in class

Even if you have to stay in class, you can still give yourself and your students a change.

- if students have been listening, let them talk.

- if they have been talking, let them stop talking and spend one minute thinking of a beautiful sight
they once saw or say.
- if they have been facing the front, let them face the back.
- give them a two minute ‘window break’, where they can look out of the window and give you a
running commentary on what they can see.
- if they have been sitting still, ask them to stand up, stretch, rub their palms together, rub their faces,
their forearms, their upper arms, wriggle their feet, bend and stretch their knees, touch the ceiling,
touch the floor.
- if you have been doing ‘dry’ work, read them a lovely poem, or play some music.

Break activities can act as smooth transitions to the next phase if you choose them carefully.

Complete break outside class

You can use break time by giving little tasks like these.

- ask your students to come back from the break with one of the following:
 the names in English of all the colours that have caught their eye
 the name of the thing that made the loudest or quietest noise during the break
 a description of one of the pictures in the hall
 one unusual but repeatable thing they learned about a classmate
 a verbal list of ten words learnt in the first part of the lesson
 a summary of the first part of the lesson
 information on what to do if there is a fire in the building
 the names of some of the books on a certain shelf in the library or book cupboard

Your choice of break work needs to be considered in how far it supports the work done in the previous or
following part of the lesson.

Ends

Ends of the lesson need to start long before the bell goes or finishing time arrives. There are a lot of
important things that can comprise an end. Here are some of them:

- review the lesson

- give back old homework or set and explain new homework
- write dialogue journals
- make plans for the next lesson
- tidy up the classroom for the next teacher
Homework

Giving back homework that you have marked and commented on can obviously be done at any point in
the lesson, but for new homework relating to the lesson in progress it´s a good idea to short it out towards
the end of the lesson.

In order to set homework properly you need to know what other teachers have set for the students. This
allows you to negotiate with them the amount and timing of homework. Then you need to:

1. write up the tasks on the board

2. mark clearly which ones are essential, which are for which students and when the different tasks
need to be completed. Encourage the students to set their own homework goals too.
3. check all this is understood
4. tell students what will happen to the homework
5. while the students are copying this into their notebooks, make a note of it yourself

If you have trouble filling in lesson plans, ask the students to do tasks which will contribute to future lessons.
For example:

- prepare a one minute talk in …

- prepare review questions for the class
- draw a diagram of your room and label what you can in English
- copy down the label of any product imported from an English-speaking country
- categorise all the words from the last week into three clear categories of your choice
- do a matching exercise
- write notes for and against something

If you have too much material for lessons and too little time for marking, then you will need to give tasks
for homework which don´t require marking, for example:

- review work done in class

- prepare work for the next lesson
- write to pen pals or companies

For students who are doing free writing, ask them to select one or two categories only that they want
corrected.

If you work with translation in your classroom this makes excellent homework.

Dialogue journals

Dialogue journals are conversations between a teacher and a individual student that are written down
confidentially in a notebook that passes between them at regular intervals throughout a course.

If students tell you that they don´t know what to write about, give them ideas.
Variations

If you have large classes, people who write a lot or you are very busy, try these variations:

- different students write on different days so you don´t get all the dialogue journals in on the same
day.
- allow students who don´t particularly take to the idea to drop out naturally.
- allow time in class for dialogue journal writing.
- encourage students to write dialogue journals to each other and only drop you a line when they
have a query they can´t answer themselves.
- deal with pleas for correction by using reformulation techniques.

What have we done today and why?

It is useful feedback for the teacher and useful clarification for the students to restate things. There are
many ways of doing this:

 the teacher, perhaps referring to a menu previously negotiated with the class, can recap on which
points were covered.
 the students can in turn state what they think have been the main points of the lesson.
 the students can write the ends of sentences that the teacher starts, for example: In this lesson I
found out / liked / learned / began to understand / wanted to / didn´t understand …
Next lesson I´d like to…..

Plans for the next time

Give yourself a minute towards the end of a lesson to get some help planning your next one. Share the
tasks you had written down for homework and the students´ views of what they would like to do next time
with your students and run by them any other ideas you are thinking of for the next time.

Filling up the last remaining moments

Here are some ideas from my ‘fillers’ list:

 name in English all the contents of someone´s bag or pencil case

 suggest 20 things an ordinary object can be used for apart from its normal purpose
 choose a category, e.g. countries, and then go round the class starting the new word with the last
letter of the word before
 I spy with my little eye something beginning with ‘J’
 give a sneak preview of what you will deal with in the next lesson
 tell a joke
 collect some simple, funny cartoons for people to describe each other and explain in English
 Do the reverse of the warm-up ideas used at the start of the lesson. Thus, the spiral would now be
drawn outwards from the centre, encouraging students to unwind and open up by use of a visual
metaphor and become more ready for a change of subject and room.
Other opening ideas that can be used as fillers are:

 start a discussion about what is now written up on the board from the point of view of t he next
class.
 if you moved the furniture, you can now ask the class to put the chairs and tables back where they
were before the start of the lesson.

Conclusion

The activities described are not designed to kill time. They`re all expressions of concern with cultural,
affective, organisational, conceptual or methodological aims.