Lesson Plans 

Lesson Plan on Motivation in CMC

The most motivating lesson plans will allow for students to express their individuality and creativity in the language they use and the projects they do. All these activities would be done in the target language.

Activity 1: Getting to know each other:

Students fill out an online questionnaire about themselves and/or write up profiles of themselves much like we did at the beginning of our collaborative project. These questionnaires/profiles are shared via email or posting to a course conference or bulletin board.

An alternative way of doing this is, for more advanced students, for example, is to divide students into groups or pairs, and to have them design their own questionnaires and use them to interview each other via email or chat. Then each student would be responsible for developing an online portrait of another student. Questions could range from the personal, regarding age, families, personal and academic interests; to the professional, concerning academic background, goals, strengths and weaknesses.

Activity 2: Communication discussion activity:

This activity can promote motivation in that it actively involves the students in a discussion of moral issues, which can prove to be an empowering mechanism to get people excited about the task at hand and willing to work on it, even if it means giving up their own free time to do so. The activity allows students to learn how to prioritize within their group, how to negotiate priorities, and helps increase their awareness of the decision-making process. It also is a good follow-up exercise to activity 1 above in that it increases learners’ awareness of their own culture as well as of that of their classmates and peers. After learning about each other as people, this activity helps students learn about each other within their respective cultural contexts. It also allows for the learning of new vocabulary and language in the target language through the use of the "authentic" task of negotiation.

The students are divided into groups, and communicate, via chat, email, or threaded discussion. Each student is to read the following sentences (or other thought-provoking age- and level-appropriate sentences):

1. Foreigners who go to live in a new country should give   up their foreign habits and adapt to the new country as   soon as possible;

2. Minority members of any population should conform to the new customs and values of the majority.

Then the groups discuss these issues, preferably via chat or threaded discussion. If everyone disagrees with the statement, the group must change the wording so that everyone in the group agrees with the new version. Then the groups re-write the statement and post it to the class or course conference so that their teacher and peers can read the old statement, and the new version, and ask questions about the changes, and discuss what they think.

This kind of task is very motivating and promotes group interaction and negotiation. In addition, this kind of activity can be used to help teach how to express feeling and opinions using: "I believe…", "I assume…", "In my opinion…", etc. New vocabulary can also be introduced in this context, using the distribution (either before the lesson, or as part of the introduction of the task) of word lists.

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