August 18th, 2009
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.
Recently, someone said