Using PowerPoint to Design an ESL Lesson

You have access to many teaching tools when you can produce an English as second language lesson plan with Power Point. Pictures of vocabulary words, hyper links to informational You Tube videos, and recorded dialogs are just a few of the many features you can incorporate into your Power Point lesson plan to make it engaging and informative to your students.

Pictures:

Vocabulary can be taught by trying to explain it in words, or you could use photographs and clip art to help you explain the meaning of the words you are trying to teach. Students will have a better understanding of new words if they can see pictures to help them understand the meanings. Keep your pictures relevant and simple, however. There is no need to fill a slide up with photographs to help explain just a few words.

Recorded Audio:

You can record custom dialogs and listening exercises for your students to play at appropriate times during your lesson with a Power Point-presented lesson. Students will be able to hear authentic speech during the lesson. You can send your lesson to your students after class so that they can then review the speech that they heard during the lesson on their own time and repeat it as many times as they think necessary to better understand it.

Video:

Put a link to a You Tube video into your lesson if you are studying, say, job interviews. Your students can watch a short video on how to act during a job interview. Students can then discuss pre-determined questions you come up with, listen for new vocabulary you've pre-taught, or perform their own job interview skits after watching a video of one online.

The Written Word:

You can write a short article that covers just a few slides that are relevant to your lesson. This will save on the cost and time of having to copy many pages of reading material that you want your class to go over. All the students can read it during the lesson, and the slide after the end of the reading material can be used for discussion questions students can talk about after they've read the material. Vary up how your students read by having one student read part of the article or have the students read it all silently.

All this is provided that you have access to a laptop or personal computer with Power Point or a similar presentation program installed on it if you teach privately (Check out Open Office for free office software you can download.), and/or that your classroom has a personal computer or laptop, a projector, and a screen you can use for teaching purposes.

Be sure that you do not cram too much information on to each slide. Give your students handouts of the slides so that they can take notes and still pay attention to what you are teaching. (Use printer set up to put six slides on each piece of paper, and print front to back to save on paper.) You don't want your ESL students coming up to you after the lesson and saying, "I've been Power Pointed." That is not an English phrase you want your students to learn and say to you.

Keep it simple. Just main ideas should be on your slides. Don't clutter them with pictures, and vary them up by changing design layout with each lesson. Keep transitions and animations to a minimum. They can detract from the content of your lesson.