The ESA Methodology of Teaching - Types of ESA Lessons
This particular methodology is known as a straight arrow ESA lesson. If every single lesson that we undertook with our students was a straight arrow ESA lesson then it is quite possible that the students would be able to predict what is going to come up next and whilst this is good for the lower level students, then it could potentially become a little bit boring for our higher level students. So what Harmer did in his ideas about ESA, was to generate two other types of ESA lesson that we can use to try and generate a little bit more interest. So, the other two types of ESA lesson that we can follow: The first is known as a boomerang lesson and the second is known as a patchwork lesson and what we're going to do is to have a look at those other types of ESA lesson in a little bit more detail. Okay, so what we'll do now is to go through each of the types of lesson to see how they are created. The straight arrow, as its name implies, is just running through each of the three phases E, S and A in a straight line. The second type of lesson is known as the boomerang and, as the name implies, what happens in a boomerang lesson, is that we send something out to start with and that comes back to us. A boomerang lesson would be something like this. We always start whatever type of lesson it is with an engage phase. That's to get them talking and thinking in English. From the engage, we then move directly into an activate activity before we have studied any of the language. What is likely to happen here is that the students are not going to create the perfect language, either in terms of their vocabulary or in terms of the grammar. So, this is going to indicate a gap in the students? knowledge. What we can then do, knowing what that gap in the knowledge is, is to study that particular gap and once we've completed that, we can then reactivate in the second activate phase to see whether they are able to use that knowledge. In the patchwork ESA lesson, really all we can say here is that we're going to start with an engage phase, we're going to end with an activate phase and really anything we like can happen in here, in terms of the A's and the S's and the E?s. So, in the patchwork lesson, what we're doing is putting together all of these different components E, S and A in no particular order. What we'd like to do now is to have a look at actual examples of each of these three types of lesson so that you get a clearer idea of what they might involve.
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