Lesson Plan 04

Lesson focus: essay writing

Level: Heterogeneous
Time: 1 hour and 20 minutes
Class profile: Age: 19-23
University undergraduates in an ESL context

Materials and resources: An online library, MS Word, internet and e-mail

Lesson aims:-
Main aim: By the end of this lesson, the students will be able to develop collaborative writing skills in the context of EAP.

Secondary aims:
Improve the students’ critical thinking skills.
Develop the students’ reading skills.

Personal aims: Integrating CALL in an ESL context.

Using genre-based and process-based approaches in the context of EAP.
.
Anticipated problems:
.

Anticipated solutions:

Assumptions:

Stage and aims time interactions procedure Materials and

resources
Lead-in 15 Teacher- Teacher writes the topic “essay writing” on the interactive Interactive white board
minutes students white board and asks the students how they composed
To brainstorm and activate the students’ essays before.
schemata on essay writing.
Teacher elicits the structure of an essay from the students
and write them on the interactive white board.

The teacher displays a figure which shows the structure of

an essay.

The teacher asks the volunteer students to come in front of

the class and name the figure using their activated schemata
of the structure of an essay.
Modeling
students
To introduce the genre of the target text
type.
To make the student identify the purpose
the text-typed achieves.
To teach the text structure and the type of
language used.
Teacher- Teacher provides students with an essay downloaded from
an online source.
Teacher asks the student to identify the thesis statement,
topic sentences and the conclusion remarks of the essay.
Teacher provides students with a few guiding questions to
make them aware of the language used in the essay.
e.g. What words/phrases does the essay writer
use to give additional information?

In this activity students discover the terms such as

additionally, accordingly, as a result of and etc.

The teacher asks the students to search online for more

vocabulary items.

Joint construction
To provide guidance to the students to
recognize the structure and language
used in an essay.
Teacher- Teacher selects a short essay and deletes some words,
students phrases and the sentences which include the thesis
statement and topic sentences.
The teacher displays this essay on the interactive white
board and the student also have a soft copy of it in their
PCs.

Teacher and the students collaboratively work on a gap

filling activity to complete the essay finding suitable words
and phrases for the deleted ones.
 Also the teacher and the students jointly write a thesis
statement and topic sentences suitable for the topic and the
content of the selected essay.

In this activity, students write thesis statements and topic

sentences first in groups and exchange among peer groups.

Independent construction

Brainstorming and gathering Students- The teacher divides students into groups and asks to
information students compose an essay on “social media” as a collaborative
writing task.

The teacher provides students with links of videos on social

media.

The students watch the videos and approach the necessary

information using the given journalistic questions.
E.g. what is social media?

The students read about social media using online libraries

and web sites and make notes.
Outlining the essay Students- The students identify the sub topics of the main topic and
stduents draw a mind map using a mind mapping software.
To improve the skills of organizing ideas.
Identifying the sub topic of the main The students outline their essay using the mind map and
topic to build up the structure of the build up a thesis statement and topic sentences.
essay.

Enhancing critical thinking by writing an They discuss in the group and self-evaluate the outline of
argumentative thesis statement. the essay.
Drafting Students- The students produce the first draft of the essay using MS
students word.
The students put their thoughts to paper
using the knowledge gained through the In this session students allow words to flow without any
pre-writing session. editing or interruption.

The students build mechanics of writing The students can make use of inbuilt spell and grammar
(spelling, grammar, punctuation). checker in MS Word.

They can use online thesaurus to find various vocabulary

items to avoid the repetition of same words.
Revising Students- The students exchange their first draft among groups for
students peer evaluation via e-mail. (In this activity group A and
group B, group C and group D shares their first drafts. )

The students peer edit the first draft of the other group
based on the guidelines given by the teacher.

After receiving the peer feedback students rework on the

first draft and produce a second draft.

When composing the second draft the students find the

exact vocabulary, fix spelling and grammar mistakes, and
modify sentence structure or sentence order and check the
relevance of the content of the essay to the topic.
Editing and publishing Teacher- The students e-mail the second draft to the teacher for
students teacher evaluation.

They edit the second draft on the basis of teacher

evaluation.

In this session the students re-examine what was written to

see how effectively they have communicated their
meanings to the reader.

The students take language errors, global content and

organization of the essay into their consideration and
produce the final draft and e-mail it to the teacher.

The teacher publishes the students’ essays on a web page

created on the university web site.