As an English teacher, I try to teach my students in the most effective and communicative ways. I want my students can learn English in accordance with the learning objectives. In the concept of learning, I emphasize to my students to learn English as a language rather than a science. This I did to make the students able to use English as a communication tool. Thus, the result will be on the communicative aspect. Therefore, 4 major skills in English are the main objectives of language learning; namely listening, speaking, reading, and writing.
One of the topics I taught last semester was the descriptive text. To achieve the learning objectives of the descriptive text, the students should be able to write descriptive texts on how to describe a person, a place or something in accordance with the English features. Typically, I use some media in teaching the topic such as pictures of an object to be described, video and even the use of social media like Instagram.
On this occasion, I would like to create a lesson plan on how to use Instagram as one of the media used to improve the ability of writing descriptive text.
Introduction
I started my English class by introducing the learning topic to students. The topic of learning is How does it look like?. In this topic I explain the definition of descriptive text, the purpose of using descriptive text and language features used in descriptive text. Before I end the introduction session, I make sure that students understand the text with some questions.
- What is descriptive text?
- What is the main purpose of deskriptive text?
- What are language features of descriptive text?
Basic Language Competence
Based on the above introduction, there are 3 basic competencies of students in learning descriptive text, they are:
- Students should be familiar with descriptive text.
- students should be able to understand the definition, the main purpose and the language feature of descriptive text.
- Students are able to write a descriptive text based on identification, facial feature and personality
Learning Activities
I divide the activity into two parts; activities in the classroom and activities outside the classroom. For activities in the classroom is a formal learning activity where teachers start with the introduction of the topics and discussion.
- Teachers introduce materials and learning topics to students by explaining the definition, purpose and language features of descriptive text.
- Teachers provide examples of the use of descriptive text in daily life.
- Teachers demonstrate some pictures of famous characters and places, then ask students to describe the facial appearance of the images.
- Teacher distributes students into groups. Then, the students choose the object for their description.
- After 10 minutes, one representative of the group describes the object they chose in front of the other groups.
- After the representatives of each group finished describing the object, the teacher draws conclusions from the lesson and explains the activities that will be done by the students outside the classroom using Instagram to describe a place through the photo.
Activities outside the classroom
- Each student selects one of the historic places or tourist destinations in their city, then they photograph the place.
- Students share the photo through Instagram and write descriptive text on Instagram caption column to describe the place they have photographed (min. 3 paragraphs).
- Before sharing the photo each student must ensure that they have mentioned the teacher's Instagram's username so that the teacher can check their text.
- The teacher can give the activity deadline for 5 or 3 days.
Conclusion
The use of social media for language learning is very important since they are very popular nowadays. The teacher can use various social media in his or her teaching to support students learning in this digital era. not only Instagram, they can also use other sosial media for language learning such as Facebook, Twitter, or even Steemit.
Regards,
ALFYD, English Language Teacher