ELT in Brazil

This is another TBL lesson for my Business English students. However, the timeline of this post is a tad different: I have not yet taught this lesson as I write this. I will describe what I planned for the class, then what I did, and finally what happened and my assessment of the lesson plan. If you’re reading this it probably means the lesson worked or there’s some takeaway from it.

In the previous lesson, my students read about 4 candidates for the CEO position and decided on the best candidate. It will be interesting to keep the same subject and use similar skills in this lesson.

I’ll begin the lesson by asking them about their week at work. I always do this to try and ‘fish out’ a DOMGE lesson from them whenever possible because, when it happens, it means I’ll teach a profoundly relevant class and save my lesson plan for next week – cutting some precious prep time!

If a DOGME lesson doesn’t happen, I’ll ask the students about the departments they have the most interface with and what people do in these departments. The idea here is to elicit this key language as they’ll need it when dealing with the company’s daily routine in English in the future. After talking about these departments and working on some emergent language, I’m going to ask them to, individually, rank the departments in terms of their subjective perceived importance.

After ranking them individually, I’ll tell students that they are going to share their rankings with each other and have to agree on a single ranking. Before that though, I’ll allow students some time to prepare for the task and plan how they are going to approach it. I’ll set students on task, listen to their interaction, and take notes for feedback later on.

Something that just occurred to me was that students could, next class, assign the remaining CEO candidates to the top 3 departments in the company. That would be an interesting way to connect the lessons and revisit the language they used previously.

What actually happened:

DOGME did. I began the lesson by asking them about their week at work and whether Trump’s election would affect what they do (they both work in lobbying for a large multinational). The students had similar views on the issue with some points of disagreement. I participated in the conversation by asking questions to keep it going and took notes throughout. Some of the questions I like asking to support conversations are:

What makes you say that?

How did you reach that conclusion?

Do your peers agree with your views?

Why do you think some people disagree with that?

Why do you think that is the case?

The point here is to try to get the students to interact in the most authentic way possible, so the use of display questions is forbidden and all questions asked are either referential questions or conversation-fuel questions such as the ones above.

After some time discussing and having reached a consensus that yes, Trump’s election is relevant to their work and will have an impact on their routines, we dealt with some emergent language and I gave them feedback. You can see my (messy) notes below.

Can you guess what we worked on based on the notes?

For the next class:

Well, since I did not use my lesson plan today because of what students brought to class we will be doing the listing and ranking task next class and then matching the remaining CEO candidates on the other. Stay tuned for an update on how that lesson went! (if I actually get to teach it next time).