Lesson Planning: Everyday English

This lesson was prepared for a 12th grade class at an advanced level. The first activity is easily adjusted for almost any level, but the second activity works best at the intermediate-advanced level.

The goal of this lesson was to focus on everyday English, or practical English. So instead of just working on academic English (analyzing a text, having a debate, etc.) we worked on simple English used in normal situations (making a reservation, returning something at the store, etc.). I used put together two different activities for this lesson.

To begin with, I wrote short dialogues (there were 16 students in the class, this lesson works best with even numbers, but can be tweaked for an odd number) having to do with different "real life" situations, each dialogue was between a "speaker 1" and "speaker 2." I then divided the dialogues, so that for each scenario there was one sheet with only speaker 1 parts on it and one sheet with only speaker 2 parts on it. I passed out the parts randomly and had the students walk around the classroom and read their dialogues with each other, trying to figure out which speaker 1s and which speaker 2s belonged together.

Once they found their partners, we went through the class, reading the dialogues out loud (I wasn't actually planning to do this, but it didn't take as long as I had thought to find their partners, so I was killing some time). The students who did not read the dialogue were then asked to identify the situation. And, of course, I asked for any vocabulary questions after each dialogue.

Then, still with their partners, I handed them out new scenarios that had to do with their original dialogue (for example, the group who's original dialogue dealt with making a reservation, now had to write a dialogue to change a reservation). I gave them about 15 minutes to write a new dialogue based on the scenario they were given. After they finished writing their own dialogue, they passed it to the group on their right, and we read through all the new dialogues out loud.

After having done this lesson now, I definitely think I would change/rearrange parts of it, but I think the main point still came across!