New lesson plan: Wedding Bells

Tugce Kalafat

Wedding Bells - pre-intermediate level

Wedding Bells
pre-intermediate level

Description

In this lesson, students practice reading for gist and detailed through a text on changing attitudes towards marriage. Firstly, the students discuss whether people prefer to get married today as much as they did in the past. A gist reading activity follows to see if the text agrees or disagrees with the idea. The meanings of the vocabulary items related to marriage are clarified for the students to use for the next fill in the gap activity where students match some sentences with the correct paragraph. Next, some true / false questions are given to the students for detailed reading. Finally, some open ended discussion questions are given to the students and they are asked to state their ideas regarding the topic.

Materials

True False Questions

Main Aims

To give students practice reading for gist and detailed in the context of changing attitudes towards marriage.

Subsidiary Aims

To give students practice in speaking for fluency.

Procedure (40-46 minutes)

Lead-in (10-12 minutes) • To set lesson context and engage students

Teacher writes on the white board the statement "Marriage is a thing of a past" and tries to elicit the meaning asking questions to the students. The teacher asks concept check questions to make sure everybody understands. (T: Today, is the number of marriages up or down? S: down, .. , T: Did more people get married in the past? S: yes, ... T: No couples get married today? S: People get married, but not much.) Once the meaning is clear, the students are given 3 minutes to discuss in pairs whether they agree with the statement or not. Then they share their ideas with the whole class.

While-Reading/Listening #1 (5-6 minutes) • To provide students with less challenging gist and specific information reading/listening tasks

The students are given 3 minutes to read the text and decide whether the text agrees or disagrees with the statement on the board. The students quickly discuss the answer in pairs and share it with the whole class.

While-Reading/Listening #2 (5-6 minutes) • To provide students with the meanings of the vocabulary items in the text

The teacher reflects the scanned text on the white board and goes over the vocabulary items in the paragraphs. The teacher underlines "increase" and asks the students to say the opposite. Then T does the same for marriage X divorce, dead X alive, agree X disagree (with).

While-Reading/Listening #2 (10-12 minutes) • To provide students with more challenging detailed, deduction and inference reading/listening tasks

The students are asked to match the given sentences with the correct paragraph and fill in the blanks in the paragraphs. The teacher does the first item as an example and gives Ss 5 - 6 minutes to do the remaining three. Ss pair check and the teacher goes over the answers eliciting the answers from the students.

Post-Reading/Listening (10-10 minutes) • To provide with an opportunity to respond to the text and expand on what they've learned

The Ss are asked to discuss the questions in ex.4 in pairs and are given 5 minutes. Next, the teacher asks the Ss to share ther ideas with the whole class.