INTRODUCTION
Teachers may wonder “which way they ought to go” before they enter a classroom. This
usually means that teachers need to plan what they want to do in their classrooms. Most
teachers engage in yearly, term, unit, weekly, and daily lesson planning (Yinger, 1980).
Yearly and term planning usually involve listing the objectives for a particular program.
A unit plan is a series of related lessons around a specific theme such as “The Family.”
Planning daily lessons is the end result of a complex planning process that includes the
yearly, term, and unit plans. A daily lesson plan is a written description of how students
will move toward attaining specific objectives. It describes the teaching behavior that will
result in student learning.
This chapter addresses the daily planning decisions that English language teachers
make before they enter the classroom. Included in this discussion are the interactive and
evaluative decisions teachers make during and after the lesson. Richards (1998) stresses the
importance of lesson planning for English language teachers: “The success with which a
teacher conducts a lesson is often thought to depend on the effectiveness with which the
lesson was planned” (p. 103). For the purposes of this chapter, lesson planning is defined
as the daily decisions a teacher makes for the successful outcome of a lesson. This chapter
discusses the following issues associated with lesson planning:
Why plan?
Models of lesson planning.
How to plan a lesson.
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