English for

Follow-up
16 Set this activity as homework. 
17 Put learners into groups of four, with people from 
different disciplines if possible, and encourage them to 
ask questions about the flowcharts that are presented. 
Lesson 3 Planning makes perfect
Time: 90 minutes
By the end of this lesson, learners will be able to
➡
use the language of sequencing to describe a flowchart 
showing the stages of preparation for a class they teach 
➡
use classroom English to work with handouts
Lead-in 
1 
Learners’ own answers.
Language focus
2 
Answers 
1 d 2 a 3 f 4 b 5 e 6 c
3 
Learners’ own answers.
Listening 
4 
Answers 
1 background reading 
2 observing and collecting real-life ideas 
3 identifying students’ needs and interests 
4 choosing types of activities 
5 thinking of ways of involving students 
Audioscript 
39
How do I prepare for a lecture? Well, first I 
1
read the literature 
and get the best ideas in the subject area and then I look 
around – life supplies us with a lot of materials, actually. Like, for 
example, I get a lot of ideas when I travel in different countries. 
2
I keep my eyes and ears open for new ideas for my course. So 
much for the material. 
And then I start thinking about how to make the course 
interesting for my students. What will make my students listen? 
And I start 
3
relating myself and the topic to my students’ needs 
and ideas. I try to remember myself as a student and what 
interested me then. Of course I understand that life has changed 
a lot and I look at today’s students and ask myself: what might 
interest them? That doesn’t mean that I change the topic – it 
means I change the angle to cover the topic from.
And then I 
4
think about which kinds of activities I could use, 
because everything, lectures or seminars, should be a dialogue, 
a conversation. My attitude to lecturing is that I’m not there to 
talk at students. My attitude is that I want to talk with them, 
have a kind of conversation. Even if I talk more in monologue 
than dialogue, technically speaking, I still want to involve them 
mentally, encourage to respond to me, so 
5
I think of questions 
or other triggers for responses. I think about this as I write my 
lecture, it’s part of my preparation. 
Preparation is important, but in real life, you often need to 
improvise, change your activities, depending on the day, or the 
mood of the students, or the weather even: you may change the 
whole range of activities. You may plan one thing and you may 
end up doing something completely different.