LESSON PLAN

Date: 22/12/2014

Student - teacher: Cem Güney

Learning Stage of Class: Pre-Intermediate

Age Level of Class: 14

Size of Class: 34

Time: 40 mins

Lesson Title: Comparative Adjectives

EQUIPMENT NEEDED: Materials such as an orange and a tangerine or a towel and an emery paper to show the students their contrast. Additionally, some pictures.

OBJECTIVES:

1- The students will be able to compare things with the comparative adjectives they know.

2- The students will be able to compare their family members using their characteristics and physical features.

3- The students will learn the tips about the spelling of comparative adjectives and be able to write some comparative adjectives properly.

INTRODUCTION (WARM UP) :

 I am going to tell the students that we often need to make comparisons in our lives even when buying a little and humble present for a friend and that we sometimes get stuck between two options and want to make a decision for the better one. So I am going to stress how frequently we need comparisons in our daily routines. I am going to try to attract their attention towards making comparisons this way.

VOCABULARY:

 In the reading & writing activity of the ‘while’ stage, I am going to have the learners make sentences with some vocabulary words they might not be familiar with. Using them in sentences will allow the students to appreciate them better and permanently and reinforce comprehension.

Pre Activity

 In this activity, there are objects on the teacher’s desk in the class. The students are supposed to make comparisons using these items. I place them in groups instead of a mixed style so that it’ll be easier for the students to guess which goes with which for comparison work. One by one, they come and pick a group of items then make the comparison by saying for instance ‘’ The knife is sharper than the scissors ‘’. Afterwards another student comes, gets another set of items and repeats the same procedure.

Aim: The activity aims to attract student enthusiasm with real life materials and rise their awareness of how to compare things. With bringing real materials to the classroom, it is mainly targeted that it will be a good visual support to the learners and will be a great source for the learners who use their visual learning channel as the primary way to learn.

While Activity

 In this activity, the students firstly do reading and then writing. They are distributed the reading paper first and then are given the instructions. The instructions are already written on the sheets but, I repeat them so that they do not fail to understand any point about what to do. In the reading passage, Chris from Edinburgh introduces us to his family and refers to his family members’ physical features and besides this, several facts belonging to their characters. Comparative adjectives are the main focus in this reading text and they are stressed by being written in bold.

 After the students are done with the reading, they are asked to write a short, similar text to introduce their own family members using comparative adjectives. A ‘Help Box’ is provided below the text to be a guide to the students in case of having difficulty finding appropriate adjectives to make comparisons.

 After they finish writing, I call them to the board in pairs. Then one student from the pair writes 3 words on the board for his/her pair to ask a question using the specific comparative adjective. For example s/he writes: ‘’ my father ‘’, ‘’ my mother ‘’ and ‘’ generous ‘’. The other student reads the words and asks: ‘’ Who is more generous? Your father or your mother? ‘’ Upon this question from his/her pair, the student who has written the words answers: ‘’ My mother is more generous than my father ‘’. They take turns and repeat the same procedure.

Aim: This activity is preferred as it contains reading, writing and speaking skills in an integrated way. It aims the students to be exposed to learning comparative adjectives by all of these 3 ways. As the topic to write on, it takes the students’ own family members. With this feature, the activity aims to give the students ease in writing since it would be simpler to mention about the people they know.

Post Activity

 The last activity is a game on comparative adjectives. The rules of the game are not complex. It’s a triple-choice test, actually. The class is divided into 3 groups as there are 3 rows of desks. I write a sentence on the board with a blank in the middle. I look for the comparative adjective used in the sentence. The game starts from the foremost desks and continues towards the back of the rows. I distribute the competing learners the choices on small sheets of paper. They choose and circle one of the three options. They are free to decide on it in pairs. In the options, there aren’t different comparative adjectives. There’s only one but there are 2  misspelled next to the correct and originally spelled one. I get the answers from the three desks representing their own rows. The pairs who choose the correct choice get one point for their groups. One student from the pairs who answered correctly comes and sticks the right answer on the blank given on the board. It goes on until the last desks of rows at the back of the class compete and it ends with them.

Aim: This activity aims to improve the students’ spelling knowledge for comparative adjectives by making them exercise on a few examples. In general, EFL learners in this level make the common mistake of misspelling words and this happens more often with comparative adjectives. Thus, such an activity was chosen to help the learners learn some rules and ways for turning adjectives into comparatives.