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 –>
Thanks very much for this! Going to use it today here in Istanbul, Turkey
Brilliant ideas! Thanks mucho…
I’m taking the CELTA now, and finding your site has been a bit help when I haven’t taken clear enough notes or have no time to ask the other trainees.
By the way, the articles in English, like in German, Dutch, Danish, French, Spanish, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, and so on, come from demonstrative pronouns or number words. English is a typical late Indo-European language, and Late Indo-European languages have tended to develop articles, because earlier on, they had a lot of case endings.
See, over time, as the sound changed, the case endings wore off or got confused, and using a demonstrative pronoun or a number together with a noun was the strategy speakers used to make the gender or case of a noun more obvious when the noun’s own ending couldn’t do the job.
“The” is a worn-down version of “that” and “an” is a worn down version of an old pronunciation of “one.” English doesn’t have case endings at all anymore, but the articles still stay around as a way of saying “Hey, what follows is a noun.”