Planning A Real-Life-Based ELT lesson

Part One — The Idea Behind the Lesson

When creating a lesson, one of the first questions I ask is: “Where will students use this in real life?” I was the kind of student who often asked this question in class, and I rarely received a convincing answer. In many cases, even my teachers themselves seemed unsure about how what we were learning connected to life outside the classroom.

For this reason, I wanted to choose a topic that connected English with something students could actually use in real life .

I started thinking about my own experiences and asking myself: Which skill I learned at school has actually helped me solve a real problem in my life?

Then I remembered something. One day, I was looking out of my bedroom window and saw my little brother and his friends playing football in a park. The park is right next to a highway, and even worse, it is very close to a traffic light and a downhill section of the road.

While I was watching them, I saw their ball roll onto the highway. That made me realize how dangerous the situation was. So, I decided to write to the local authorities and ask them to install a fence around the park to prevent the ball from going onto the road again.

About a week later, they actually installed a fence.

After remembering that experience, I thought, “Ah, I have to teach this to my students!”

At this point, I should add a little context about our practicum. In the final year of our program, we have a mandatory teaching practicum. During the first four weeks, we mainly observe the students and the classroom environment. In the following weeks, we start planning and teaching our own lessons. However, each of us usually has only one class hour available to teach. As you know, a well-structured lesson often needs more than a single class hour, especially when it includes several stages and communicative tasks. Sometimes, we solve this problem by planning a lesson together with a peer. This allows us to spread the lesson across two class hours. That is exactly what Buse and I did with this lesson. I discussed this idea with Buse and also Buse liked the idea. However, simply teaching the structure of an email was not enough for us. The more important question was: How could we teach it in a way that students could actually use in their own lives?

We could have taken an artificial problem from a coursebook—perhaps a situation set somewhere in the United Kingdom that had little connection to our students' everyday experiences. But that would defeat the purpose of the lesson. Instead, we decided to look at real problems in the city where our students lived and ask them to use English as a tool for responding to those problems.

Before the lesson, we walked around Sinop and photographed issues that students could easily recognize. We found an electrical pole standing directly in the middle of a tactile paving path for visually impaired pedestrians, a road that was in very poor condition, and, most importantly, a bus stop next to the school that provided very little protection from Sinop's strong wind and rain.

Part Two — Idea to Lesson Plan

After we found our core idea and lesson topic, we wrote the objectives and outcomes of the lesson. Then, we started discussing how we could present the topic effectively.

The pre-task and introduction were already quite strong because the students would see real problems from their own lives and their own city. We thought this would immediately grab their attention and make the lesson feel more meaningful.

At this stage, we decided to look back at some of our older lesson plans. I should also give credit to Prof. Sibel Söğüt because her Teaching Language Skills course and the feedback she gave us had a major influence on the way we approached lesson planning. Without that experience, we couldn't create lessons like this.

After reviewing our previous lesson plans, we decided to add a section where students could discuss the problems we had identified and also contribute problems they had noticed themselves. Simply looking at the problems would not be enough, and it would not fit well with a student-centered classroom. The students needed to interact with the problems actively. In this way, they could practice speaking, listening, and reading while also brainstorming possible solutions and identifying other problems they had noticed in their own environment.

However, this created another challenge.

During the first four weeks of our practicum, we observed the students closely. From what I observed in the classroom, the students were not very used to speaking English during lessons. Their classes focused heavily on grammar, and they often switched to Turkish when they wanted to express their ideas. This created a challenge for our lesson because it was based on CLT and required students to communicate actively in English.

Because of this, I realized that I needed to make speaking feel safer and easier for them. I planned to provide plenty of support through sentence starters, useful vocabulary, model answers, and guiding questions. I also wanted to praise students who made an effort to speak English, even if they made mistakes, so that other students would feel more confident and willing to participate.

Second, I planned to set a clear English-first expectation before the lesson started. Instead of simply telling students not to speak Turkish, I decided to explain clearly that using Turkish during an English lesson was not acceptable and that they should try to express themselves in English as much as possible.

Finally, if students were still reluctant to volunteer, I planned to invite individual students to answer and support them closely with scaffolding. I hoped that once one student participated successfully, the others would see that speaking English was manageable and feel more confident about joining in.

At this point, it is important to notice that lesson planning is not only about deciding what we are going to present. We also have to think about how students might react to each activity and what we can do if they do not respond as expected. That is what makes lesson planning both enjoyable and challenging. In a way, it feels like playing chess with your students—you try to predict their next move and prepare your response in advance. 😀

This was the first article in my series about planning a real-life-based ELT lesson. In this article, I mainly talked about how I approach finding lesson topics and how I design the introduction stage of a lesson.

In the next articles, I will continue with the other parts of the lesson: how we planned to teach the structure and salient language features, how we collected students’ emails with the help of AI and a website we created, and finally, how we gave students feedback on their work.

Thanks for reading!