Overall, the lesson was an opportunity to learn about a new use of the past simple passive

and the present perfect passive, which is giving main news and recounting details about
such news, respectively. Learners found the staging of the plan logical. It allowed them to
slowly build an awareness of the difference in use between said tenses.

Strengths

 Learners’ understanding of the uses of the passive tenses introduced clearly

improved as the lesson proceeded. This was evident in their ability to use the present
perfect passive for giving the main news and the past simple passive for talking
about details in the freer practice stages. Lesson aims corresponding to this can be
considered achieved.

 The use of the past simple and present perfect passive to give news to others
provided a running theme that was maintained throughout most of the lesson. This
contributed to improving learners’ understanding of this use and allowed learners to
enjoy the liberty of choosing what to give news about, knowing that they only needed
to make sure to use the target language appropriately. This helped bring an element
of personalisation to the lesson, as learners gave news about most relevant topics.

 The decisions to have learners repeat the freer practice task, to a bigger audience for
the second one, proved sensible as learners’ confidence notably increased, which
did aid their fluency. They each started telling the rest of the group about their
partner’s news. This task saw some of them using more exponents of responding to
different news, making their production more natural.

Weaknesses

 On the guided discovery sheet learners were given, questions were too open-ended.
They asked learners ‘why’ certain sentences were in certain tenses, aiming to elicit
responses such as “speaker is giving main news/ speaker is mentioning details”.
Learners needed more guidance. Providing choices would have helped narrow the
focus of the questions, making the answers easier to work out. They would have
saved on teacher talk spent explaining the sheet and increased learners’
involvement.
 A demonstration was needed of how the freer practice activity should have been
done, i.e. someone giving news and recounting its details. This would have helped
learners understand what was expected of them to produce, making the setup less
time-consuming.
 The controlled practice stage had 5 bitty pieces of news to turn to the passive. It
would have helped if it continued the theme of the lesson, e.g., a gapped out script of
the phone call Maria made to Jack (as a continuation of the display listening text).

Consolidation and Follow-up

 After this lesson, more pronunciation work, particularly on intonation, may be needed
to enhance learners’ awareness of how best to give and respond to news. Following
that, learners will need to practise giving news in as natural contexts as possible to
be able to replicate natural intonation.
 Also, learners will need to practise showing interest by asking for details in the past
simple, which often takes place in a similar real-life situation.