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How to teach new language was the focus of unit 7. The topics covered were new vocabulary, grammatical structures, language functions, how to teach them and important points to consider when doing so. When selecting new vocabulary to teach it is important to keep in mind the relevance to the students and task, the frequency of the language's appearance, and the teachability in relation to the student's level. For a typical ESA lesson, some examples of how new vocabulary can be taught are through pictures or miming during the 'engage' stage, gap-fill or matching exercises in the 'study' phase, and story-building or role-play in the 'activate' stage. When introducing grammatical structures students need to know the meaning, usage, patterns, spoken and written forms. Examples for an ESA lesson include using realia or asking questions for the 'engage' stage, dialogues for context or word order activities for the 'study' section, and story building or discussions to 'activate' the structures learnt. Teaching language functions is also important. Attention must be paid to the task of the language function such as inviting, refusing, agreeing or disagreeing, as well as the appropriateness of the language -is it formal, informal, tentative or technical. In an ESA lesson, there will be a strong need to activate the language learned so boomerang or patchwork style lessons will work best. There are different areas of language to consider when teaching students. This unit focused on each of those areas and suggested ways to teach them as well as things to keep in mind. I think that using ESA lesson structuring is helpful to keep lessons balanced and focused.
