How LessonWriter Conforms to TESOL/TEFL Best Practices
By Dr. Kate Mastruserio Reynolds, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, TESOL Coordinator and Associate Professor

Within a well-designed ESL/EFL lesson, there will be need for instruction in a grammatical form, a vocabulary set, or a phonological pattern. LessonWriter is a teacher resource that helps teachers quickly and easily develop simple scaffolded grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation activities, along with comprehension questions and graphic organizers, to accompany any text for use in their classes.

LessonWriter's analyses of text allows the teacher to teach a grammatical form, for instance, within the context of communicative interaction, which is a best practice in teaching grammar, according to Fotos (2001), Long (1991) and Larsen-Freeman, (2001 and 2003).

Other ESL/EFL best practices with which LessonWriter is congruent are:

  • Instructing both sentence-level and discourse level communicative competencies (Savignon, 2001)
  • Previewing and reviewing key vocabulary for comprehension and retention (Herrell and Jordan, 2004)
  • Focusing on form activities to allow teen and adult learners' the ability to learn rules for clarity and future use (Doughty & Williams, 2003)
  • Scaffolding controlled-input activities that allow teachers to build to more open-ended communicative activities (Crookes & Chaudron, 2001)
  • Teaching prefixes, roots and suffixes of words (Nation, 1990; Schmitt, 1997)
  • Increasing learners' pronunciation intelligibility (Celce-Murcia, Brinton, & Goodwin, 1996)
  • Using advanced organizers to allow insight into a reading's meanings (Herrell and Jordan, 2004)

The website does not replace the teacher or stifle ingenuity, communication or instruction of integrated skills; rather, this program automates the rather mundane tasks of creating grammatical, lexical and phonological activities within a communicative-focused, integrated skills ESL/EFL learning environment. If the teacher employs LessonWriter as a tool and not as a curriculum or text, the uses of it will be facilitative of language learning. So when, for example, a teacher encounters a grammatical form in the context of a reading, and realizes the students need to comprehend the form, meaning, and use of this grammatical pattern (Larsen-Freeman, 2001, 2003) for passage comprehension, LessonWriter can assist the teacher in designing and selecting activities for learners instruction and practice.

 

References

  • Coelho, E. 1982. Language across the curriculum. TESL Talk, 13(3): 56-70.
  • Echevarria, J. and A. Graves. 2007. Sheltered content instruction: Teaching English language learners with diverse abilities, 3rd edition. Boston, MA: Pearson.
  • Holten, C. 1997. Literature: A quintessential content. In The Content-Based Classroom: Perspectives on Integrating Language and Content (Eds. M. A. Snow & D. M. Brinton). White Plains, NY: Longman.
  • Krashen, S. 1981. Second language acquisition and second language learning. Oxford: Pergamon.
  • Larsen-Freeman, D. 2001. Teaching grammar. In Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language, 3rd edition (Ed. Marianne Celce-Murcia). Boston, MA: Heinle.
  • Larsen-Freeman, D. 2003. Teaching language from grammar to grammaring. Boston, MA: Heinle.
  • Norris, J. and L. Ortega. 2000. Does type of instruction make a difference? Substantive findings from a meta-analytic review. Language Learning 51, Supplement 1: 157-213.
  • Short, D. J. 1997. Reading and ‘riting and…social studies: Research on integrated language and content in secondary classrooms. In The Content-Based Classroom: Perspectives on Integrating Language and Content (Eds. M. A. Snow & D. M. Brinton). White Plains, NY: Longman.