ESL Lesson Plan: A, An, The

This is a lesson plan for teaching articles that was requested by a reader. Articles are possibly the simplest, yet the most most arbitrary grammar rules to learn. Most languages apart from English do not have articles, and I know most ESL students are completely flummoxed by their need. But well, strange is the English language

Presenting a lesson on articles is not the most difficult of things, anticipating your particular students’ problems is. Considering that there are no articles in Latin, Sanskrit or Persian – the mai-baap (roots) of many modern languages – English teachers, at least the ones interested in etymological mysteries, may wonder where the articles in English language crept up from. I haven’t found a meaningful explanation yet, so if you can give me a clue, fire away in the Comments section.

But anyway, the etymology of articles in English is barely of interest to ESL students. With skeletal explanations and a LOT of practice, you can be on your way to solving even that problem. I think the Test-Teach-Test approach seems to be the best approach with articles and used it in this lesson plan.

Give the students two simple rules and drill these throughout the lesson -
1. A/An are used before nouns which are new to the topic.
2. The is used before nouns which have been introduced already.

I used an extract from abridged Othello with gap-fills where articles should be, and let the students get into the skin of the character. I used this particular text because my students would have been familiar with the text already (but give ‘em a short summary of the action so they know what’s going on anyway)

So here goes, enjoy!

Click to DOWNLOAD Lesson Plan: Present Perfect Tense and Present Perfect Continuous Tense –>