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Top Lesson Plans for ESL and EFL

Adults students learning English as a second language — Tetra Images - Erik Isakson/Getty Images

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Updated on February 13, 2019

Use these popular English lesson plans for ESL and EFL. These lesson plans provide a comprehensive review for beginner, intermediate, and advanced level learners.

01

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Brain Gym® Exercises

These simple exercises are based on the copyrighted work of Paul E. Dennison, Ph.D., and Gail E. Dennison. Brain Gym is a registered trademark of Brain Gym® International.

02

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Speaking Skills - Asking Questions

Many post beginner to lower intermediate students are quite capable of expressing their ideas reasonably well. However, they often run into problems when asking questions. This simple lesson focuses specifically on the question form and helping students gain skill while switching tenses in the question form.

03

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Practice Stress and Intonation

By focusing on the stress-timed factor in English - the fact that only principle words such as proper nouns, principal verbs, adjectives, and adverbs receive the "stress" - students soon begin sounding much more "authentic" as the cadence of the language begins to ring true.

04

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Using Modal Verbs to Problem Solve

This lesson focuses on the use of modal verbs of probability and advice in the past tense. A difficult problem is presented and students use these forms to talk about the problem and offer suggestions for a possible solution to the problem.

05

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Young Learner's Writing Workshop

Many young learners are required to write essays in English. While most of these students also write essays for other courses in their native language, they often feel hesitant when writing essays in English. Learn how to help students become familiar with writing an essay in English.

06

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Teaching Telephone English

Teaching telephone English can be frustrating as students really need to practice their skill as often as possible in order to improve their comprehension skills. Once they have learned the basic phrases used in telephoning, the main difficulty lies in communicating without visual contact. This lesson plan suggests a few ways to get students to practice their telephoning skills.

07

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Teaching Phrasal Verbs

Getting students to come to terms with phrasal verbs is a constant challenge. The fact of the matter is that phrasal verbs are just rather difficult to learn. Learning phrasal verbs out of the dictionary can help, but students really need to read and hear phrasal verbs in context for them to be able to truly understand the correct usage of phrasal verbs. This lesson takes a two-pronged approach to help students learn phrasal verbs.

08

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Reading - Using Context

This lesson provides a number of pointers helping students identify and use context to their advantage. A worksheet is also included which helps students recognize and develop the skill of contextual understanding.

09

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Comparative and Superlative Forms

The correct use of the comparative and superlative forms is a key ingredient when students are learning how to express their opinion or make comparative judgments. This lesson focuses on first building understanding of the structure - and of the similarity between the two forms - inductively, as most students are at least passively familiar with the forms.

10

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Combining Ideas to Write Paragraphs

Writing well-constructed paragraphs is the corner-stone of good English written style. Paragraphs should contain sentences that convey ideas concisely and directly. This lesson focuses on helping students develop a strategy for combining various ideas into well-formed sentences which then combine to produce effective descriptive paragraphs.