OK.  This is a short article that I mentioned in the post titled Reuse, Recycle, and Reduce your Prep Load as a Language Teacher where I discussed how essential it is to your sanity as a language teacher to get the most out of your CALL lesson ideas. So, what I'm going to do here is give you a quick look at how you can take one language learning outcome and one basic lesson idea and quickly massage it into a bunch of different activities.

Basic learning outcome:  Give the students the opportunity to practice and develop descriptions and descriptive language by using photos.

Super simple lesson plan sketch

1. brainstorm descriptive vocabulary - focus on language that is relevant to a specific task (e.g. describe a person) or go for any descriptive language (verbs, adjectives, adverbs, comparatives etc.) as you see fit
2. Give each student a photo for them to work with.  Either use photos that target a specific task (e.g. a person's face) or go for any interesting photo that suits the needs of using descriptive language in general
3. Have the students brainstorm about the picture
4. Have the students write about the picture in an MS Word document (this is the computer part)
5. Done

Any of you who want to winge and whine about this being a very basic lesson plan - read the sentence just before #1 above and flesh it out to meet your own needs.

Modifications to this lesson

1) change the source of the inspiration (e.g. the photos)

• use photos the students bring in
• have students search for photos online
• use video online or offline
• use items from your home or theirs
• use music or sounds from online

2) change the output required

• have them write a blog entry on their personal blogs
• have them find a photo in an online photo gallery and write a comment about it there
• have them record their descriptions  on the computer using audacity
  • then put them into a podcast!
• get them to write a chain story (2 descriptive sentences / student/ photo - then photo+sentences goes back to 1st student who compiles them into a descriptive paragraph)
  • write it, record it, blog it as you see fit

There are surely more modifications that can easily be made, but these should get your brain thinking in the right direction.

If you mix and match different modifications in inspiration and output you can make a bunch of different activities and lessons for working on descriptive language.  None of them will take more than 10 minutes to prepare, but any of them could easily provide a full hour of valuable practice time in class.

Providing great learning opportunities for ESL students using simple CALL techniques should be exactly that - simple.  Don't overthink things.

Till next time,

Cheers,

Eric

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