ESL Lesson Plan: Writing formal letters

This was among the last of the lessons I presented during the month-long CELTA course. I was the first in my group to teach a writing lesson, so I had had no exposure to these before. And the tutors did an input session on writing lessons the morning of, so my afternoon class could not have benefited much from it

Yet, this was also among the best lessons I presented, if I may say so. I think this was primarily because I relied on my own common sense (rather than resorting to looking for sample plans.. ) and my experience as a journalist in outlining the basic rules of succint writing. At the very least, the attached lesson plan is a good guide to teaching letter writing.

I decided to teach cover letter writing to my group of upper intermediate ESL students because a lot of them had told me they would soon be applying for jobs. Once I started analyzing the form of the cover letter, I found that it could easily be divided into the same categories as any decent journalistic report/story – who, what, why, where, when, how.

Once, I had this figured out, I simply divided the cover letter into sections where these questions are answered. I projected a sample cover letter on our interactive whiteboard (oooh yeah, St. Giles has those in abundance). I had fun using the interactive whiteboard, and it did make explaining things a little easier. Especially in this case, I had to refer to large blocks of text and write notes about them. All I did on the whiteboard was circle the projected text and write my side-notes which the students could copy for future reference.

After the class, a couple of my co-CELTAtians came up to me and asked for the handouts so they could learn how to write cover letters too. Told ya ’twas among my best classes!!

You can download the ESL Lesson Plan: Writing Formal Letters here –>

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 too. Drop me  a line if these were useful. Cheers!