Sample Unit of Instruction

At the beginning of this semester our department introduced a new curriculum focusing on developing students’ professional English skills. This was a result of institutional goals and student needs. In order to meet these needs a course was designed that seeks to develop students 21st century skills while also improving the English language skills necessary to succeed in the international workplace. To provide opportunities for the development of these skills students in groups of three or four were tasked with a semester long project to create a model company. They need to describe the personnel, describe and advertise a product or service, describe the history and vision of the company, and finally create a new position and advertise it. All of these materials are presented in a Google Site and shared in Google Communities. They are then evaluated by their peers and teacher and required to make revisions to their original submission before the end of the semester. Finally, they will give a group presentation about their companies in their entirety as part of their summative assessment. The upcoming unit of instruction concludes in the company vision page.

Goals

This class meets twice a week for one hour each time. The goals of these two classes are for students to familiarize themselves with ways to talk about future goals and plans personally, professionally, and creatively to further describe their model companies. They will also have another opportunity to practice appropriate discussion skills in their groups to plan and organize the information they wish to represent on their Google Site. Finally, students will post links to their web pages and write a short critical evaluation of one of their peers’ company web pages.

Instructional Model

The instructional design model I chose to use for the design of this unit of lesson was the Backward Design Model. Richards (2013) explains that backward design in language teaching “starts with a careful statement of the desired results or outcomes: appropriate teaching activities and content are derived from the results of learning.” (p. 20). Besides its application to curriculum design, backwards design is appropriate for planning individual lessons as well. It is uncomplicated, and frees the design from being defined by the textbook, but rather by the learning objectives for that unit of study. The textbook is seen as a resource that can be used as little or as much as needed to help students reach the desired goals.

Learner Objectives

The lesson is divided over two hour-long face-to-face classes and an online component completed after the second class. The learner objectives are as follows.

Class 1:

1. Use will and going to to talk about personal goals.

2. Use infinitives of purpose to give reasons.

Class 2:

3. Use adverbials of probability to talk about future trends.

4. Review useful expressions for discussion.

5. Discuss, plan, and organize company vision.

Online:

6. Complete website company vision page and submit to Google Community

7. Critically reflect on one of your classmate’s webpages

ISTE Standards

The integration of technology in this curriculum as a whole and in this individual unit is what supports student learning. The website and online community “foster(s) a culture where students take ownership of their learning goals and outcomes in both independent and group settings.” (ISTE.E.6.a) They have communal ownership over their website and learn collaboratively through critical reflection and revision of their work in a safe online community.

Assessment

The assessment for this unit is the students’ web page submission. In a group each student will choose one topic: long term goals, short term goals, local goals, global goals, environmental goals, or employee goals and write a short description of that section utilizing language points describe in the learner objectives. They will also determine what multimedia they should include to support their writing if any. Finally, they will contribute to the assessment of their peers by critically evaluating one of their classmates’ web pages. The teacher will also write a short critique of each section giving students ideas for revision and asking questions for further exploration. Revisions need to be made before the end of the semester.

Learner Characteristics

The students in these classes are all South Korean first year university students. There are more female than male students and study a range of majors, including chemical engineering, business management, fashion design, food and housing, and international studies. Korean students are usually fairly confident in the English receptive skills of reading and listening but struggle with productive skills of speaking and writing. They usually need more time to plan what they want to say, process what they heard and formulate a response. This is why discussion strategies need to be reviewed and practiced regularly throughout the semester. It is also the advantage of the online components of the course where students have the freedom to plan what they want to write and have opportunity to learn from their peers and teacher and revise their work.

Materials

The materials for this course will be drawn predominantly from the required textbook for this course, Business Plus 2 from Cambridge University Press (Helliwell, 2014). Relevant pages will be chosen from Unit 7 and presented in the face-to-face lessons using Powerpoint. No supplementary materials are needed for this unit of study.

Activities

The first learning objective is for learners to be able to talk about their professional and personal short and long term goals. One of our students’ primary life objectives is to find employment in the future. To assess students’ prior knowledge of future tense and to model language talking about the future tense the first activity is a listening activity of three current university students nearing graduation talking about their goals for the future. Then students will look at samples of language from the listening to draw a conclusion about rules defining the use of will and going to when talking about definite and indefinite future plans. Next students will complete a cloze reading passage utilizing infinitives and future tenses. The first class will conclude with a classroom speaking activity where students interview five of their peers about their futures. They will take notes about what they learn and then report back to their group and compare the responses of their peers with their own future plans.

The second class begins to move from the personal goals to the goals of their model company. The first activity is a reading activity about the innovative city, Seongdo, in South Korea. The students skill the reading for key details and learn about ways this city is being innovative such as transportation, energy, communications, and waste disposal. Some of these topics may stimulate some ideas related to what their company’s goals could be. Next students will learn about adverbials of probability and use them to make predictions about their country’s future. They will then review some expressions relevant to discussions by practicing a sample role play showing them how to discuss in groups about their predictions. They will attempt to discuss their predictions using the target language. Finally, they will attempt to discuss, plan, and organize their ideas about their company’s goals for the future.

When students leave class they should have chosen one area of their company’s vision that they want to describe on the group’s website. They should have some notes from their discussion and a few ideas about what they will write about. They will then write their section of the web page and one member of the group will submit it to the Google community for feedback. Finally, they will need to critique of their classmate’s submissions.

Media and Technology Implementation

The media in the classroom is limited to scanned copies of the Business Plus (Helliwell, 2014) textbook presented via Powerpoint with embedded audio. Due to the limited time with students and the fact that this is the first time teaching this material I didn’t want to overwhelm myself or the students with too many different types of media. The course uses Google educational apps to support learning outside of the classroom. Students are members of a private community and create a website using Google Sites. They then share links to each new web page they create, offer feedback on their peers’ submissions and revise their web pages based off student and teacher critique.

Evaluation

Overall I was satisfied with the first lesson in this unit, but the second lesson suffered. I think one of the reasons it was not as effective was because it was asking students to utilize higher order thinking skills. Despite the attempts at scaffolding students had difficulty using the target language in the discussions and regularly reverted to their first language when I was not monitoring. I think I need to incorporate some self assessment strategies in terms of target language use in the face-to-face sessions in order to hold them accountable. This was not established earlier in the semester so some bad habits have developed.

I also saw from the writing on their webpages that quite a few groups neglected to include infinitives of purpose and adverbials of probability despite it being mentioned in the task checklist that is in their Google community. I may need to be more direct in how I draw their attention to these mandatory elements that I expect to see in their submissions. Although this was a little disappointing they can revise their work based off my feedback. They did incorporate the future tenses that we practiced in the first class. Perhaps the activities in the second lesson should have been more targeted on real world company web pages instead of using the book content about cities and country, or I needed to more clearly spell out the connection between the different things they were learning in the reading and prediction activities to the topics they could write about on their web pages.

References

Helliwell, M. (2014). Business Plus. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press

ISTE Standards FOR EDUCATORS. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.iste.org/standards/for-educators

Richards, J. C. (2013). Curriculum approaches in language teaching: Forward, central, and backward design. Relc Journal, 44(1), 5-33.