Lesson Plan Rationale

I chose to create a lesson plan for EFL third graders in Korea. I used US English
Language Proficiency standard and tried to adapt them for EFL students. In this setting, the
subject of teaching is essentially limited to language arts, so I chose to create a lesson that can
expand upon a story book.
According to ELPA 21, an ELL can analyze and critique the arguments of others orally
and in writing and identify reasons an author or a speaker gives to support the main point.
Michigan English Language Proficiency standards state that students can write simple notes,
make brief journal entries, and write short reports using basic vocabulary, and common language
structures. The topic is simply reasons.
This is meant to be an introductory lesson, so students will not have had much formal
exposure to this structure. However, they would certainly be familiar with the question why?
so that is the background I would build from (Building Background). The content objectives are
to recognize, request, and explain reasons for particular outcomes and events. The language
objectives are built into the content objectives, and specifically are to focus on sentence structure
and vocabulary.
The lesson plan incorporates listening, reading, writing and speaking. The students listen
to a story and the concept is put into practice during the second read. Using a story book
provides the first source of comprehensible input (Lee & Van Patten). Students practice reading
and writing as they copy what is on the board. Reading is considered to be an active skill
(Savignon). Students practice writing and speaking again as they get a chance to apply the
concept to real life, and then create a story together. Creating stories together allows students to
practice the essential skill of speaking in an L2 (Lazaraton).
This lesson was built backwards from the activity and adapted to fit the standards of the
group that I chose, and it can be adapted fairly easily for other levels. This is an example of taskbased learning (Van den Branden). Since kids naturally ask a lot of questions, it would be useful
to embrace that curiosity and make it a natural thing to learn from. Creating a story can
encourage creativity because the students can apply the concept but the reasons they give do not
necessarily have to be realistic. The concept of reasons is quite basic but very essential and will
be applied continually.
As a second language learner of Korean, I was also able to consider the structure of
reasons in Korean. It is similar to English, but it informed the vocabulary choices I made to
begin teaching with.