hi english teachers this video is for you i've prepared a series of videos called the stages of an english lesson and in these videos i'll do just that i'll clarify for you what the important stages are of different lesson types the aims of each stage and the importance of these as well my name is biana vonssil and i based this series of 25 years of experience as a teacher trainer and cell to tutor in part one we're going to be looking at the stages of a grammar lesson and in this first video we're going to of course look at the first stage of a grammar lesson and what's the first stage well it would be the lead-in and i believe that there are four very important ingredients to a good lead-in and they are set the context gauge students interest in the topic diagnose the knowledge of the grammar you're going to teach and lastly make it work as a warmer for the class itself what i've experienced is that quite a lot of teachers are very good at actually setting the context using videos or visuals to create interest in the lesson and to set the context so we're not going to be talking about those two ingredients now i'd rather focus on two ingredients which i feel teachers sometimes have problems with and they are using the leading as a warmer and secondly using it to diagnose students knowledge of the grammar that they're about to teach so let's first look at using the lead-in as a warm-up well the problem i see very often is this the teacher walks into the class and engages the students in a whole class discussion talking in open class to the students about the topic of the lesson this might seem very friendly and nice but is it effective well i'm afraid it's not because in open class each individual student does not really have enough time to speak and you'll very often find that the more forthcoming or confident students are going to take over and the shyer students might not really say anything at all so if this is supposed to be a warmer that lead-in did not work because in a warmer we need to kind of warm up the linguistic muscle get the students interacting with each other because they probably haven't spoken english for the last say 24 hours at least so we need to get them engaged and the best way to maximize student student interaction is to hand over for the students to work in pairs and in groups talking about the subject matter that's going to come up in the class so make sure you're teaching not just a few strong students but you're teaching the whole class and you're engaging them from as early as possible the other ingredient i see shortcomings with is using the lead-in to diagnose students knowledge of the grammar that you're going to teach i do see often and this this is where i see a problem that the teacher does address the target language that he or she is going to teach but they do this they enter the room and they tell a story or an anecdote where they use the grammar they're going to teach repeatedly and then at the end they turn to the students and ask them questions using the same grammatical structure well it may very well be that the students they address respond using the grammar that the teacher had just been using that they are going to teach but does that mean that the students actually already know the grammar but we don't know because they are probably just parroting the grammatical structure they just heard the teacher use repeatedly and if they were asked using a grammatical structure they'll probably try to respond using the same grammatical structure so we don't know if the students know the target language so this activity i'm afraid failed to work as a diagnostic lead-in so what we what we need to do then is we need to think of a way to engage the students in an activity where we would naturally use the target language of the test or of the lesson sorry so i saw a good example of that not so long ago and this was a teacher who was going to clarify used to for past habits as in i used to do a lot of exercise and what they did was they started by showing a picture of the same person as a student studying at school and in a working environment as an adult professional and then they asked is this person's life the same now as it was in the past and the students of course said no all right and what about you is your life now very different from when you were at school and of course the students would say yes it's different and then immediately they handed over for the students to do this task describe how your lives were different when you were at school and tell each other about things you did then that you don't do anymore in this task it would be natural to say i used to study more i didn't use to worry about money so this activity facilitated students talked about past habits it would facilitate the use of used to so this was a successful diagnostic warm-up because during this activity the teacher could monitor and hear what this language the students were using to talk about past habits were they using simple past were they not using any past forms at all were some of them trying to use a variant of use too so this activity worked to gauge their knowledge so what did this teacher do well first they set the context of the class created interest in the idea of past habits and then handed over for the students to work in pairs and in groups to see if they could use the target language so they monitored this and after this activity they knew more about the students ability to use the target language or talk about past habits in general but for this to work you have to be careful that in your diagnostic walmart you do not use the target language before the students get engaged in the task you do not use the grammar when giving instructions and you don't correct their grammar in the feedback for the diagnostic warmer you simply listen and show interest in what they said and from monitoring this process the teacher could make decisions about the subsequent clarification stage of grammar by the way our next video will be on how to clarify grammar so what could what decisions could the teacher make based on the diagnostic warmer well they had a clarification planned but they could use their observations to tweak that clarification a bit they could use these observations to decide which aspects of the grammar that they needed to focus more on or they would need to focus more on would it be more on the pronunciation on the meaning on how to write it it could also give them information about who to call on when trying to elicit the grammar decisions about to what depth to clarify the grammar and lastly if the clarification stage was student centered they could use this information to decide who to have worked together in the student-centered clarification stage so if i have done my job here you should now have a better idea of the importance of a lead-in the ingredients of what makes for a good lead-in remembering that all four ingredients are equally and in our next video we're going to for part two which is going to focus on how to clarify grammar so this will be in part two of this series so see you in the next video