I Spy - Week 11B (Pronunciation)

For the first time I attempted to create a lesson that focused on pronunciation.  It is loosely based on the lesson plan presented in Kelly that practices the past tense ending -ed.  My Ss are pretty good at that pronunciation so I decided to take it one step further and include a few irregular endings such as -ought, and -ew.  These days the 'Avengers' super hero movie is really popular with my Ss so I used that as a theme by having the Ss use the characters names in their sentences.

I previewed and activated schema by brainstorming about the meaning of 'avenge' and watching a 3 minute youtube trailer of the movie.  After the video, in their groups, I had the Ss list the members of the Avengers team and their corresponding weapon/power.  After a minute or two I chose Ss at random to give me names and powers that I listed on the board.  This was important because the Ss needed this information to use in the production phase later.

As a way of presenting I created a ppt that listed five examples of each past tense ending that we would be practicing.  At this point I did extensive drilling of the sounds both chorally and individually.  Once I felt confident that they could figure out the appropriate ending individually we moved on to slides that featured a picture of a member of the Avengers doing some sort of action.  After providing one example myself, I chose Ss at random to stand up and create a past tense sentence based on the pic in the slide. 
For example, one slide had a picture of Captain America throwing his shield.  The chosen S was expected to formulate the sentence 'Captain America threw his shield.'

For most of the slides the Ss had no problem but in a few cases I found that the Ss didn't know what to say.  This could be because the action in the picture was not obvious or they lacked the appropriate lexicon.  In those cases I used some eliciting and MIC techniques to scaffold the sentence I as looking for. 

For the production phase I created a handout where the Ss had to use pictures to guide them to a certain sentence.  For example a picture of Iron Man - mushroom cloud - tank
would lead them to create the sentence ' Iron Man blew up the tank' or 'Iron man bombed the tank'.  There were 7 different sentences they had to make.

I concluded the lesson by choosing Ss at random to  read their answers and I wrote them on the board as well as recited each one chorally.

For my first attempt at a pronunciation lesson I was pleased.  The Avengers theme really engaged the Ss and we moved through the stages rather smoothly.  The only downside is that when it came time to present their answers the Ss simply read their answers out loud.  I don't like them to do that these days but this lesson was more about pronunciation then grammar or conversation anyway.