ESL Lesson Plan: Reading

This one has to be the easiest lessons to plan for – along with listening. Reading, listening, speaking and writing fall in the category of Skills Lessons. Often, you will find students, especially adult learners, insist on learning skills rather than formal grammar. Of course, skills are the most important part of any language because they allow one to communicate with others. But ESL learners often do not realize that grammar and vocabulary (which are language items) are as intrinsic to learning a new language as the skills.

A Japanese ESL student who masters the American accent but forms her sentences using the Japanese form of S-O-V sentences (instead of the English S-V-O) is going to comprehensible, but only slightly. You get my point

{{To download this lesson plan, go to the bottom of the post}} Click here to see the other lesson plans I have posted.

Anyway, so this was a Reading lesson planned for the elementary level ESL students at St. Giles International in San Francisco. The lessons we taught our students were free since the teachers (we) were CELTA trainees.

Since the lessons were free, we had a fluctuating student population every afternoon. For the most part, this did not affect our lesson plans. For this particular Reading lesson however, I wanted to make sure the reading for interesting for all the students, whatever their age group. The reading section that I had been assigned from the Touchstone book was horribly slow. I was sure most of my students would be at sea with the level of vocabulary in it..

So I decided to write my own reading text and plan the gist and detailed tasks accordingly. Here’s the plan:

ESL Lesson Plan 5: Reading

Lesson Aims:

To give students practice in reading and comprehension

Aids and Materials:
Self-created

Vocabulary for each Reading text (I had 3)

1.search, garage, apartment, bored, hammer, nails, hammering, socket, electric shock, thrown back

2. backyard, swimming pool, tricycle (ride/drive), shut

3. ghost, woke, idea

Introduction/Script

I wish I could be a kid again. I would not study, I would only play.

What did you play when you were a kid?

Were you naughty?

Elicit the words, make marker sentences, make them repeat them.

Can you all think of something naughty you did as a kid?

Ok, we’ll talk about your naughty childhood later….

Your teachers were also very naughty when they were kids. Do you find out how?

Let’s try and guess…

SPEAKING PRACTICE

Now, write/draw a few words/pictures on the board which would simply explain the first story.

My example was: Darin, 6 years old, bored, hammer, nails, socket, electric shock

Try to elicit a possible story from the students.

READING PRACTICE
Now, let’s see what really happened when Darin was six.

Let’s read these stories about your teachers. You have to answer the questions at the bottom of the page also.
Tell them to answer the gist questions in pairs. Compare answers when done.

Then shuffle the class and tell them to work on the comprehension questions in pairs. Compare answers.

FREE SPEECH ACTIVITY

Ask students to talk to each other about something funny that happened when they were kids.

Click here to DOWNLOAD this Lesson Plan –>
CELTA Lesson Plan: Reading -

If you’re a current CELTA student looking for help with your assignments, you might want to peek and see what I wrote in my CELTA assignments. They’re all available for free downloads. Drop me a line if these were useful. Cheers!