Lessons have different objectives and take place in a wide variety of contexts and formats, involving a range of learner needs and abilities. This section addresses some of the most common of these variables, and outlines the options that teachers need to consider in order to ensure that learning opportunities are optimized.

• 32 Planning a focus on listening

• 33 Planning a focus on speaking

• 34 Planning a focus on reading

• 35 Planning a focus on writing

• 36 Planning an integrated skills lesson

• 37 Planning to teach grammar

• 38 Planning to teach vocabulary

• 39 Planning to teach pronunciation

• 40 Planning for content-based instruction

• 41 Planning for task- and project-based instruction

• 42 Planning for learning opportunities

• 43 Blended and flipped learning

• 44 Learner-centred lessons

• 45 Special needs and individualization

• 46 Teaching one-to-one

• 47 Teaching large, multi-level classes

Planning a focus on listening

• It's unlikely that a whole lesson will be devoted to listening activities, but it's not uncommon to plan a lesson which has the skill of listening as its primary focus.

The aim of most classroom activities involving listening is to develop learners’ ability to understand the stream of speech – which is not simply a case of knowing all the words and grammatical structures of the language. In fact, even after many years of study, second language learners are often surprised – even shocked – by how little they understand when they first encounter fluent speakers of the language. Hence, the aim of a listening activity is not so much to teach new items of language but to help learners recognize language they are already familiar with, to process the stream of speech in real time, and to make plausible inferences when they come up against gaps in their knowledge.

So, while the overall aim is understanding, the specific aims of a listening focus might include developing the ability to:

• ▪ perceive and discriminate individual sounds;

• ▪ segment the stream of speech into recognizable words;

• ▪ identify key indicators of changes in discourse direction and stance, such as discourse markers;

• ▪ use prosodic clues (such as stress and intonation) to infer attitude, to distinguish given information from new information, to recognize turn openings and closings;

• ▪ guess the meaning of unfamiliar words from context;

• ▪ use contextual clues and background information to infer meaning and make predictions.