Delta: teaching a systems-focused lesson

This short guide is intended to be read in conjunction with (or after) the ones which focus on meeting the teaching criteria. It will, insofar as this is possible, avoid repeating anything contained in those guides which apply to meeting the teaching criteria on Delta in general.
If you have not yet looked at the guides to meeting the teaching criteria, click here for the index.
Those guides are supplemented by a guide to the things you need to avoid doing when teaching on a Delta course, in particular. Click here to go to that guide.
There are a number of links in this guide to other sections of the guides to Delta Module Two which you may like to follow as you go along. They will open in a new tab so you can simply shut the page to come back here.
Here, we are concerned with planning and teaching systems-focused lessons on Delta.

Planning

All plans should, of course be unique and focus on the lesson you are going to deliver. On any Delta course, you will be criticised for any hint of a one-size-fits-all section of a plan.

There is a separate guide to planning for a Delta lesson which considers all the assessment criteria for a plan and how to make sure you meet them. Here, we will focus on avoiding the pitfalls of planning to teach skills-focused lessons.

The class profile

In addition to
a brief general overview of the group of learners and the course,
this part of the plan requires you to provide
information about individual learners relevant to the lesson
and it is the last four words which are important.
Your overview (usually set out as a grid) will mention things like motivation, preferred learning activities, interests, special needs, classroom behaviours and so on which will, of course, be relevant to the lesson and its topic. You should also have a column headed something like For this lesson in which you comment (briefly) on the individual learners' knowledge and ability to use the language system(s) you are targeting. Do not be vague here and make sweeping generalisations along the lines of
    Has difficulty with grammar
    Is reluctant to records vocabulary
    Finds pronunciation work challenging
    Writes accurately but with little understanding of style
etc.
These are valid statements to make but you need to address the specific system(s) that your lesson targets. Here are some examples of better expressed profile sections:
    has expressed an interest in learning the vocabulary he needs for travel and tourism so this lesson on multi-word verbs to do with the topic will appeal to him.
    finds selecting the right tense to talk about past habits and routines challenging because Mandarin does not mark tense in verb forms. She should be alerted by today's focus on used to to the need to use the form for past habits now discontinued.
    is often confused by the difference between conjuncts and conjunctions so this lesson's focus on causal connections in written texts should help her to distinguish the nature of these.
    intends to start an undergraduate course in the USA next September and will need to write reports in English. The focus on the passive will help him to write more confidently in an appropriate style.
Assessor complaints to avoid:
    The profiles of learners are helpful in a general way but say nothing about the learners' needs for this structure / lexis / pronunciation training.
    The individual profiles refer only to general language ability, not to the learners' grammatical accuracy with regard to past tense forms.
and so on.
Aims and objectives

This part specifically requires you to have
clear and appropriate overall aims and learning outcomes for the lesson in relation to language systems and/or language skills and learner needs
The critical part here is and/or. Clearly for a systems-focused lesson, you will need an explicit and clear statement of what system the learners will be able to use or use better by the end of the lesson. However, no lesson is likely to be without the need to employ a language skills such as reading, listening, writing or speaking. Do not lose sight of the need to have a subsidiary aim which focuses on language skills at least partially.
Here are two examples of how to meet this criterion for a grammar-based or lexis-based lesson:
    By the end of this lesson, the learners will be better able to use tenses which express a finished action (perfective forms) such as the past simple and those in which the event or action is incomplete (such as non-finite -ing forms).
    Subsidiary objective: the learners will be able to use these tense forms appropriately in writing a short narrative in an email to a friend with a suitable sensitivity to informal style.
    By the end of the lesson, learners will be able to recognise, understand and use lexis relating to factory work including the listed verbs and adjectives. In additions they will have recycled and reinforced their understanding of expressions to describe workplace roles and relationships.
    Subsidiary objective: the learners will be able to use the language learned orally to describe accurately their and others' jobs and what they involve
Assessor complaints to avoid:
    The aims set out what is to be achieved but not how or in what setting the structures are to be used.
    The candidate has not set out in adequate detail which items of lexis concerning ... she is targeting.
    The candidate has failed to include the extensive amount of written skills work which was involved in the lesson.
and so on.
Analysis

You are required to analyse your target language in terms of form, meaning/use and phonology.
You will find a fuller guide to analysing systems for a Background Essay in this section of the site. From that analysis, you need to extract only what is relevant to this lesson. Do not be tempted to cut and paste because that betrays an inability to select what is relevant.
Your analysis should be only of the language which form the targets of your lesson and should be exemplified through the materials you intend to use. This is not the place to analyse entire systems.
There are three elements:
form:
what are the formal linguistic features of the targets of the lesson? Include here only those features you are going to teach.
This might include grammatical function, word class, negative and interrogative forms, collocation, colligation, transitivity, separability and so on.
meaning / use:
here you need to get away from usage and focus on how the forms are used in communication and whether, for example, they are typical of certain styles or registers, whether they are unusual or frequent and so on.
phonology:
even if you are focused on the use of language in written texts or purely for receptive purposes (unlikely), you are almost certainly going to have to say things aloud and elicit forms from your learners. Therefore, both you and they need to be prepared in terms of pronunciation, stress and other prosodic features. A lesson on questions forms, for example, would be severely criticised with no focus on intonation.
Assessor complaints to avoid:
    There is no analysis of the phonological features of the phrasal verbs which form the bulk of the objectives.
    The analysis lacks detail concerning how the verbs differ in terms of style and colligational characteristics (including transitivity).
    The candidate has failed to analyse the ways on which the target tense forms may be used to express unfulfilled past intentions.
and so on.
Timetable fit

Focus on the systems development programme for the group, not on everything they have done / will do next.
This means setting out quite clearly what allied work they have done and what is planned. For example, if your lesson targets a specific tense form, you need to say what other tense forms they have worked on which are related and how that links with what you are doing. You then need to say what comes next in terms of consolidation and extension.
Most systems lessons also have a skills requirement of some sort (see under aims and objectives). Do not forget to include these in the timetable fit in terms of what skills the learners are able to use adequately for the purposes of this lesson.
Assessor complaints to avoid:
    The candidate has outlined in general terms what the tense forms the class have encountered but has not made specific reference to complex tense forms used in this lesson.
    The candidate has failed to explain how this form of modality will be consolidated in future.
    There is no mention of any previous work which has been done concerning the lexis in this register.
and so on.
Assumptions, anticipated problems and solutions

You are obliged here to identify what assumptions you are making:
relevant to the aims and learning outcomes of the lesson
so make sure that you are focused on the systems you are targeting.
1. What level of mastery of the system are you anticipating that the learners already have, if any?
2. What concepts, if any, that the learners already have encountered with other forms can be transferred to your lesson targets?
3. Are you assuming that the learners will be able to handle the skills content of the lesson as well as the system objectives?
You are also asked to anticipate and explain potential problems and suggest appropriate solutions to the problems outlined.
The problems and solutions you focus on here should primarily not focus on the lesson aims (obviously) but should refer to the system in general and any difficulties you perceive concerning the concepts the language encodes or particular styles in which it is used (as well as the general issues outlined in the overall guide to planning at Delta level).
Assessor complaints to avoid:
    The candidate has not addressed the issue of how well the learners can already talk about finished past events.
    The candidate has failed to explain how he will address the issue of the conceptual difficulties the present perfect progressive presents for learners with this class's language backgrounds.
    There is no mention of a viable solution to the learners' tendency to avoid using causative forms in favour of simpler language.
and so on.
Procedures and materials

The first issue is to make sure that you plan in a section of the lesson in which the system can be explicitly described and understood by the learners. You are not smuggling in work on language, you need at some point in the lesson to have a phase in which the learners are seen to be aware of what exactly how the system you are targeting will enable them to communicate more effectively.
At this stage, you need to look carefully at the amount of time you have allocated to controlled and free practice of the targets of the lesson.
It is easier to cut short controlled practice if you perceive that an adequate command has been achieved and extend the freer practice in a communicative phase than it is to extend the controlled practice and thus cut down on the opportunity to use the language for a communicative end.
Assessor complaints to avoid:
    There is an inadequate stage of the procedure in which the focus on the formal characteristics of the system allows for the learners to absorb the complications inherent in it. The final freer practice phase was marked by inaccuracy of form.
    The candidate planned the lesson so that there was insufficient time at the end for the target language to be applied in freer communication so achievement cannot be demonstrated above the level of mastery of the form.
    The materials and the final task did not evince the target structures.
and so on.
The commentary

Here you need to focus on the system(s) you are targeting, obviously, and you need to make it clear how your planned lesson will allow for the learners to master the form, meaning, use and pronunciation of your targets.
Assessor complaint to avoid:
The commentary makes clear why this lesson structure has been chosen and why the topic should appeal to the learners but the candidate makes no mention of how meaning and concepts inherent in the lexis will be made clear and checked.

Teaching

Most of the assessment criteria for teaching are generalisable to any lesson (they have to be) so for detailed advice concerning how to meet them, you should refer to the guides to meeting the teaching criteria.
Here we will look at meeting the criteria in a systems-focused lesson, in particular, and that mostly concerns certain criteria only.
We'll take each category in turn:

Category 6 of the criteria: relationships with the learners

There is some advice concerning how to meet the four assessment criteria in the section in the guides linked above.
All that needs to be added here is that for a systems lesson, you need to be alert to whether you are making sure that everyone has an equal opportunity to understand the concepts, master the form and pronounce the targets adequately.
For example:
- If you are teaching a grammar lesson focused on the verbal processes which occur routinely in narratives, have you allowed for the learners to grasp which tense forms are absolute and which relative?
- If you are teaching lexis, have you made sure that any freer practice you plan actually demands the use of the target items?
- If you are teaching pronunciation, have you ensured that the material is equally accessible everywhere and for everybody. If it is recorded, for example, is it equally clear everywhere in the room?
- If you are teaching and aspect of modality, have you set the context in such a way that the intentions of the speakers / writers are entirely clear?
Category 7: language models and information

This includes how well you exploit and build on what the learners supply.
In a systems lesson, in particular, you need to focus on criteria on 7c, 7d and 7e.
1. 7c requires that you give
  accurate and appropriate models of language form, meaning / use and pronunciation
  so you have to be entirely certain that what you are saying about these three factors is accurate, intelligible and clear.
  You will be very heavily criticised for teaching something which is not accurate or conventional in the language.
2. 7d asks you to give
  accurate and appropriate information
  The key here is in the word appropriate. You, almost by definition, know more than the learners will need to know about the target language so your job is to edit the data so that the learners can absorb it. Do not be tempted to provide information which is peripheral or unnecessary at this stage of learning simply because you know it.
3. 7e asks you to
  notice and judiciously exploit learners’ language output
  You will not meet this criterion if you are not alert to what the learners are providing so that you can shape their language and move from partial to full mastery of the targets. Do not accept false production of the targets.
Category 8: procedures and monitoring

With a systems lesson, you need to be alert concerning the need to focus on form, meaning and use and pronunciation. When you planned the lesson, you were aware of this but when teaching it, it is easy to lose track of what each phase of the lesson is aimed at and that may allow you to wander off track and begin responding to irrelevant learner output.
If, as is quite common with anything complex, the initial phases are focused on form, be alert when monitoring tasks and getting feedback to the fact that form rather than meaning is your aim here. The same applies to phases concerned with meaning and use and pronunciation. It usually helps learners not to combine all three objectives in single exercises until the end of the lesson when they have been mastered.
Monitoring involves listening and responding.
When you monitor, there are two purposes:
1. check monitoring involves making sure quickly that everyone in the room is on-track and doing what you asked them to do. For example:
  1. If you are keen to promote the noticing of highlighted item in a text, make sure that the learners are focused on the highlighted items and not getting distracted by other matters
  2. If you want people to make select correct items for a list of alternatives, is that what they are actually doing?
  3. If you want people to monitor a listening text for target structures, make sure they know what they are listening out for and that they are not simply trying to understand everything they hear
2. support monitoring involves making sure that you are on hand when needed to help and support the learners. By definition, the targets of your teaching will be unfamiliar to your learners so they may need considerable help to notice them, pronounce them and form them acceptably.
  For example:
  1. If you are targeting the meaning and conceptual implication of a certain form, you may need to nudge learners by presenting them with an either-or distinction rather than an open-ended choice
  2. If you want people to select the right modal expression to communicate their view of, say, the necessity of doing something, you may need to interrogate them a little when they are doing this to make sure that they have the concept and relative strength of expressions right.
  3. If you want people to work on lexis, you may well find that a nudge in the direction of word class is helpful or, with verbs, a hint about transitivity will often be enough to get the learners thinking along the right lines
Category 9: management

Two critical criteria here for a systems lesson concern adapting the plan to emerging needs and ensuring learners remain focused.
1. With systems lessons, especially those focused on lexis and modality, it is often hard to judge how well a concept has been grasped so you must remain alert to the need to stop, rewind and provide alternative exemplification and explanation. Do not be tempted to carry on even though you know that some of the learners have not fully grasped the meaning of the language because that will undermine all that follows.
2. Equally, it is often easy for learners to wander off track and use language they already know rather than the language which forms the lesson's targets. You need to be alert to keeping them focused. This usually means asking checking questions frequently to help them stay on course. You may want to ask, for example:
  1. Which verbs do you need from today's lesson to talk about how likely you think something is?
    Which ones do you need to talk about how necessary something is?
    Which ones do you need to talk about how happy you are to do something?
  2. Which verb can you use with the first two nouns in the list of today's words?
    Which verbs take an object?
    Can any of them take two objects?
  3. Which expressions refer to place and which ones refer to time?
    Which of the prepositions can you use to link I walked and the road?
    Which prepositions will you use to say when something happened?

If you would like to go through some of the guides to meeting Delta criteria now, use this menu.

The teaching criteria sections and preparing to teach:

Planning for Delta	Section 6	Section 7	Section 8	Section 9	Preparing to teach	Teaching skills
The criteria one by one	relationships	language	procedures	management	visualising the lesson	a parallel guide