English Language Reading Class- Lesson Plan and Explanation. Firstly, the lesson has been designed with a group of 30 Malaysian high school students comprising both male and female in mind. The assumption is that students are 17 years old who are studyin

Authors Avatar

According to Shih (1992), reading classes have focused on the teaching of language and skills essential for the understanding of a text. Shih suggests that greater efforts must be made to equip students with ‘long-term’ skills that are transferable to other reading contexts. Taking up Shih’s point, Aebersold and Field (1997) propose a lesson model which combines long and short-term teaching objectives. This essay presents an example of a lesson designed along the lines of the Aebersold and Field model, then examines individual phases to determine whether they are directed at ‘short’ or ‘long-term’ as Shih suggested. The essay comprises a brief description of the class for which is intended, a lesson plan which details the teaching and learning procedure as well as a brief commentary of the lesson.

Firstly, the lesson has been designed with a group of 30 Malaysian high school students comprising both male and female in mind. The assumption is that students are 17 years old who are studying in Form 5. They are intermediate level reader and have average level of English proficiency.

According to Shih (1992: pp.296), it is useful to introduce ‘reading on topics of greater familiarity and personal concern’ to the students. Hence, this particular authentic text with the topic ‘Let’s talk about Love’ from ‘Beijing Today’ magazine is chosen since it contains substantial new information and is also appropriate to the students’ age and interest. Besides, the text is presented in its real world appearance with date published, page number and picture incorporated. Therefore, it prepares students for real world use and they will acquire language more readily from real examples of language (Hedge, 2000).    

Each stage of the lesson can now be considered in terms of whether it addresses a short or longer term aim. The pre-reading stage is largely directed at the short term goal as it aims at activating students’ existing knowledge about the topic of the chosen text only.

Join now!


Step 1 provides students with an opportunity ‘to verbalise what they know about the topics, thereby leading them to integrate their prior knowledge with the new knowledge that they will be encounter later on in their reading’ (Dole et.al., 1991: pp.144). In addition, the teacher can check whether students have the related cultural knowledge about the topic. Then, teacher generally explains the background information about the most important parts of the text that students need for comprehending the upcoming reading in step 2. Apparently, step 3 could be an excellent measure for students to recognise the macrostructure of the text ...

This is a preview of the whole essay