Employability skills

What's the focus of the lesson?

Responding to an informal email to a friend.

This plan focuses on productive skills, specifically writing.

Teaching learners how to use the past simple tense/comparatives/the first conditional.

This plan focuses on language systems: grammar.

Understanding a weather forecast on the radio.

This lesson uses receptive skills: listening.

Practising for a job interview.

This lesson could be focused on productive skills, speaking.

It could also include some systems work with vocabulary for the job interview.

Teaching learners how to use adjectives to describe people e.g. funny, serious, shy, outgoing

This lesson is language systems: vocabulary.

Understanding the main idea of a selection of newspaper articles

This is receptive skills: reading.

Integrating Skills & Language

• Even though your lesson is based around one particular skill or language system, it doesn't mean that you will necessarily be ONLY teaching that skill or language system in the class.
• You may have noticed that in a writing lesson, like the informal email class in the previous chapter, your learners might also do some reading (they could read a model email, for example) or work on some useful vocabulary (some words/expressions in the model email).
• Another example is in a grammar lesson; imagine you are teaching the past simple tense to learners and your production activity involves learners telling a story to each other in the past tense. Which skills and language systems are focused on apart from grammar? Here, the focus of the class is on grammar (the past simple tense) but learners are also practising and developing their speaking and listening skills.
• These are examples of when a lesson plan integrates skills and language systems. In fact, this happens in most lessons and is good practice when teaching. It's useful to bear this in mind but it's also helpful to identify which skill or language system is the main focus as this will help you decide which lesson shape to choose.

Lesson Shapes

• So how do you choose which lesson focus and shape to choose? First, you need to identify the main focus of the lesson as this will help you to choose an appropriate lesson shape.
• If you are teaching language systems, for example, grammar or vocabulary, a common choice is to use a PPP lesson.
• If your main focus is on learners practising and developing skills (reading, listening, speaking or writing), you could use a skills (pre, while, post) shape.