LESSON OVERVIEW

The main objectives of this lesson are to:

• talk about learning English through apps and other media;
• practise word order in English with funny sentence examples;
• work in groups and create sentences.

This lesson focuses on the grammar topic of sentence word order. Students discuss language-learning apps, read about funny examples of sentences from Duolingo and have a lot of practice. The lesson has been updated to give students more explicit rules on sentence word order.

WARM-UP & GRAMMAR

The lesson starts with an activity in which students talk about different popular apps (e.g Netflix, Spotify, Google Translate…) and discuss how to use them for learning a language. After that, students look at the beginning of sentences about language-learning apps and complete some of them with their own ideas. Then, students move on to grammar. First, they read a short text about Duolingo, find and correct five mistakes. The mistakes are connected to word order in English. Then, students look at the rules of word order in English and find an example sentence for each rule in the text from the previous exercise.

WORD ORDER IN ENGLISH – PRACTICE TASKS

This lesson is devoted to funny examples of sentences from Duolingo so students have a lot of practice working with unusual sentences (e.g. ‘I am the cheese’, ‘Did the fish drink water?’, ‘There is a head in the fridge.’). First, students put the words in the correct order. Then, they find and correct the mistakes in the sentences. You can also have a little discussion with students and ask them if they find such sentences amusing and if they would like to learn using such examples. After that, students proceed to more creative tasks on sentence word order in English. They create funny and unusual sentences using the given words (e.g. there – cheap – students). Then, they compare their ideas with each other. They also work in groups and imagine they have to teach someone four words (e.g. favourite, fridge, aunt, leave). They follow the instructions, create their own sentences and tasks based on them, exchange them with other students and complete the tasks.

Homework/Revision

This ESL lesson on farming also includes an additional task that you can use as homework or revision. In the task, students do two tasks to revise word order in English. First, they complete the sentences with the words in the boxes. Then, they finish the sentences with their own ideas so that they are grammatically correct. The task is available in the teacher’s version of the worksheet. You can print it and hand it out to your students. It’s also included in the e-lesson plan.