Design

Introduction

Designing a course, lesson, or activity that aligns with student learning outcomes, student needs and interests, and a communicative framework is no easy task; however, throughout the LTS program, I’ve designed just that: course curricula, a multitude of lesson plans for different purposes, and activities that meet all those criteria. From the larger concept of a curriculum design to the specific activities within a single portion of a lesson, I’ve acquired the ability to design ways for language learning that are engaging and realistic to meet the needs of the learning context. I’ve studied ways to design lessons and activities and then created these for teaching forms (grammar and vocabulary), pronunciation, isolated and integrated skills (reading, writing, listening, and speaking), pragmatics and intercultural communicative competence, language for academic purposes, and language for specific purposes. The four following artifacts demonstrate both the breadth and depth of my abilities in language learning design: a scope & sequence chart for an English for Academic Purposes course, a lesson on teaching an area of suprasegmental pronunciation, a set of three sequential lesson plans, and a set of tasks using literature. 

LT 436 - Design for Learning Language Systems

Sequenced Set of Three Lesson Plans

Lesson plans are not always isolated from one another; often they build on previous lessons and lead to future ones. The third artifact, a sequenced set of three lesson plans designed during LT 436, demonstrates this element of lesson design through the teaching of hobbies leading into writing emails. Each lesson plan in the sequence has its own learning objectives, which are specific and measurable (Purgason, 2014) ensuring that we can see if our learners have met the objectives by the end of each class; however, the skills learners develop in the first lesson plan are utilized in the following days. For example, in the first lesson, students are introduced to the topic of hobbies and develop their bottom-up and top-down skills such as skimming and scanning. In the second lesson, students utilize this new declarative knowledge of hobbies to develop questions they will ask about their penpal’s hobbies. They learn about email-writing etiquette on this day as well. In the third and final lesson plan, learners peer review the rough drafts of the emails, and a final group project on hobbies is introduced; through the drafting and peer review process, learners apply the knowledge they’ve learned about email writing to produce an email and analyze their peers’ for accuracy to genre and forms. Within this sequence of plans, learners engage in different levels of thinking as defined by Bloom’s Taxonomy (Krathwohl, 2002); for example, they start by just reading about hobbies on day one, but create and evaluate emails during the third lesson (which is reflected in the learning objectives of each lesson). Incorporating a mixture of lower- and higher-order thinking activities, and sequencing lessons to efficiently make use of the declarative and procedural knowledge that learners are gaining–while reflecting this in the learning objectives for each lesson–are key to designing high-quality lesson plans. 

Conclusion

These four artifacts show the variety in approaches, frameworks, and designs possible within language learning that I’ve come to learn throughout my time in the LTS program. I know going forward that no matter the context I end up in, I will have the skills to design curriculum, lessons, tasks, and materials that meet the needs of stakeholders and engage students in an enjoyable language learning journey.