I. CONTEXTUALIZING THE LESSON

A. Course Description & Course Context
For this particular assignment, I designed a lesson for a context that I would like to teach in once I graduate from the M.S.Ed. Program. The lesson that I planned is for a supplementary and communicative ESL course for ELP students that is offered alongside ELP’s core academic courses. While the ELP core academic courses help prepare international students to enter the mainstream (US) university programs, this particular supplementary course will focus more on helping international students develop their practical English skills to adjust to life in the United States.
In this course, students will meet once a week for one hour. There will be a new theme introduced each week related to daily living (e.g., food, shopping, health, travel, transportation, housing, etc.) that will combine both content knowledge and language instruction.
Because there is an emphasis on speaking and listening, the size of the class has been limited to 6 to 8 students per class.

B. Learners
Because the ELP students are university students and are taking the courses in order to prepare them for the mainstream university classes, the expected age range for the class is around 20 to 30 years. The students in the class come from different parts of the world including the Middle East, Asia, South America, and Europe and have a variety of first language backgrounds (e.g., Arabic, Chinese, French, Hebrew, Korean, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, etc.). According to the ACTFL 2012 proficiency guidelines, these students are in the Intermediate-Low to Intermediate-Mid range in terms of English proficiency. The students in the Intermediate level are able to create sentence-level language to convey information about familiar topics about their daily life (ACTFL, 2012).

C. Class
The previous class focused on the transportation theme, where students practiced comparing the various modes of tra...