Planning lessons: chat is an outcome too.

When we talk about planning lessons that have an outcome, teachers often misinterpret this as meaning all lessons should have a clear practical benefit. They may feel that following an action-oriented approach (as follow the CEFR calls it), means we should only design or select tasks where students role-play practical activities, resolve problems, or reach definitive conclusions. This was an ongoing debate we had when writing tasks to encourage mediation in Outcomes Third edition. As we discuss in our course on Mediation in language teaching, while complex tasks are likely to result in more varied types of interactions between students, ALL meaningful speaking tasks have the potential for mediation to take place. Ultimately, much – maybe most – of what we do with language outside of the classroom has no particular goal other than to create and maintain our social relationships. Even where we are explicitly talking about problems we are experiencing or seeing in the world, we often only tell the story and providing emotional reactions rather than give advice or decide on a course of action. So when writing or planning lessons it is more than reasonable to have as a goal: to encourage and enable chat. But what should we chat about? Well it could be many different things, just reflect on your own experiences and conversations. The point is, stories are rarely only told once so there’s always a chance something we relate in class might get re-used in the real world. And if it’s not, at least the chat in class will serve the same purpose as outside – to build and maintain relationships between the students you’re teaching.

A lesson on fire!

For example, last term I wrote a lesson for our Advanced speaking classes on the subject of fire. The theme was actually inspired by a participant in a discussion of one of our teacher development webinars, where she was talking about her efforts to keep thinking of topics for a long running advanced class. She had done a series on elements (fire, water, air and earth) and I was inspired by her idea (thank you!). Anyway, ‘fire’ lesson I planned included a section where participants related their experiences of sitting round an open fire. I think this is the type of discussion that might not always be considered as outcome-oriented or directly relevant to students needs, and I was conscious that not everyone might have something to say. Still two months later, I was lucky enough to go on holiday to Kenya and I found myself sitting round a fire in a camp in the Masai Mara. As I sat, I overheard a (Polish?) woman talking about her experience of sitting round a fire in Nepal. She talked about the relief of getting out of the cold and warming up and then explained the fire was burning cow/yak shit rather than wood. This generated a brief discussion with some of the other travellers before they went back to looking at their phones. So my classroom task did, after all, reflect a spontaneous real-life conversation.

Football is just a beginning

The same holiday suggested planning a lesson with another non-practical outcome: talking about football. Almost without exception, a taxi trip in Kenya would start with a where are you from? / have you been her before? and then quickly move on to asking/talking about the premier league and football. Again, this is another debate we have had with publishers, who are reluctant to focus on football as a topic for a task, let alone as an outcome for whole lessons.  We could maybe add F to the PARSNIPs list of taboo topics (PARFSNIPS)! But as with other subjects like politics, alcohol & religion etc,, football is just a common subject of everyday conversation, so maybe we should be planning lessons that incorporate at least some discussion about it. I know, I know … not everyone likes football. But this is also where our lesson planning and any task we set needs to leave some flexibility, We don’t have to think of the whole lesson being about a single topic/outcome or even as the sole topic of a task. Instead, we could think of, say, talking about football, more as a beginning. Because the football discussions we had in Kenya were not all about football, There was a certain amount of joking – Oh poor you! When was the last time you won something?! Or, How can you get so excited about football? (my wife)? There were also questions related to where we live (what’s local team? where is that?). Questions about if we ever go to games led to talking about the expense of tickets which in turn could lead to a more general discussion on the comparative cost of living. Sometimes we moved on to if the taxi driver played football or liked any other sport,, which on occasion led to exchanges about age and health  and even politics (poor investment and corruption).

Follow the students

I think this is also something to bear in mind for teachers. The lesson plan should never be a baking recipe to be followed rigorously step-by-step in order to get the perfect result. Some teachers worry about students getting ‘off-topic’. They may even tell students to get back to the task and make sure they practise the language that was taught. However, the actual nature of these social, ‘non-goal-oriented’ conversations is that they will normally develop in an organic way into other areas. In such cases, an outcomes-oriented teacher should perhaps embrace the side-track and follow the students. For example, they might feed back language from the side-tracks. We might also note these side-tracks as potential topics to return to and in the future plan lessons or tasks around them: which may in turn veer off in new directions – or old stories retold!

Even the buying task might start with chat and not end up with a sale

Finally, if we are going to write lessons with practical or functional outcomes, we should also recognise that the may not be functional in straightforward ways. For example, while in Kenya we had a fair few transactional conversation to buy things. However, these exchanges were often different to those you find in coursebooks where the functional language we teach is often oriented to a very particular cultural setting. So planning lessons on buying things based on my Kenyan experience would probably have an outcome about negotiating prices, or politely saying ‘I’m not buying anything’ in a variety of different ways! And they often also either started or moved on to conversations which were not strictly about buying and selling at all, so any role-play cards might like to allow for this too.

Book our teacher development webinar on alternative lesson shapes here. or we have online training courses on Plan smarter and get the most form your coursebook and how mediation can benefit your classes. Find more info here