Creating lessons for diverse EFL levels can be quite a complex task for any teacher. You have to balance the content to ensure it neither overwhelms nor underwhelms your students. This includes:
📖 Knowing and respecting the CEFR requirements;
🧑🎓 Taking into account your students’ interests and goals;
🖌️ Customizing content;
🌎 Incorporating real-world context…
Wow. Sounds like a lot of work.
In this article, we’ll take up the challenge and create 2 EFL lesson plans for teenage / adult learners about taking a gap year: one for elementary students and one for upper-intermediate. Let’s go.
Create ESL Warm-up Activities
For both levels, we need to make sure that we enter the learning process smoothly. We’re going to be using Twee AI to help us generate the content we need. For intermediate level, let’s start with some discussion questions about taking a gap year, while for elementary level we’ll go for “Lead-in activities” to generate some warm-up ideas. We like this one – getting creative with making a list of things to do during a gap year. ✅ Done.
Work on Reading and Comprehension Skills
Now, you’d probably think for reading you’d need to find some sort of an article online or in a course book. This can be tricky because “taking a gap year” is not one of those go-for topics that publishers love. Searching online, however, might not give you what you need for A2. 🤔
Twee has got you covered here too with the “Create a Text” tool. It allows you to cater the text level to the needs of your students. Lower-level students can enjoy a regular text about taking a gap year, while higher-level students can immerse themselves in an informal letter packed with slang and idiomatic expressions. Just go to “Create a text” select the genre and level you need and “Do the magic”.
Come Up with ESL Vocabulary Activities
To work with vocabulary, you’d normally read the text and select the words that you find useful for your class. Instead, we’re going to use the “Extract Collocations” tool to automatically find collocations suitable for the needed level from the text.
Then we’ll split them into halves and create a matching exercise for the lower level. Just in case there are difficult words in the text for the lower level – we’ll create a glossary with them using the “Word-Definition Matching” tool. For the higher level, we’ll generate definitions and ask students to find the defined words in the text. Have a look below.
Improve Your Students’ English Speaking Skills
Finally – actual communication. For our lower-level students, we’ll create a group activity. We’ll start with a short text about someone unsure about taking a gap year for the context, then split the students into two groups: “for” and “against”, and let the debate begin! For higher-level students, we’ll prepare some serious brain-food. Generating four different opinions about taking a gap year later in life seems like a good idea. Then we’ll have the students form arguments and provide examples supporting each point of view. It’s about to get heated in the classroom!
That’s pretty much it! ⭐ If you’re more into video format, check out our Youtube video on the same topic:
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