INTRODUCTION

Teachers may wonder “which way they ought to go” before they enter a classroom. This usually means that teachers need to plan what they want to do in their classrooms. Most teachers engage in yearly, term, unit, weekly, and daily lesson planning (Yinger, 1980). Yearly and term planning usually involve listing the objectives for a particular program. A unit plan is a series of related lessons around a specific theme such as “The Family.” Planning daily lessons is the end result of a complex planning process that includes the yearly, term, and unit plans. A daily lesson plan is a written description of how students will move toward attaining specific objectives. It describes the teaching behavior that will result in student learning.

This chapter addresses the daily planning decisions that English language teachers make before they enter the classroom. Included in this discussion are the interactive and evaluative decisions teachers make during and after the lesson. Richards (1998) stresses the importance of lesson planning for English language teachers: “The success with which a teacher conducts a lesson is often thought to depend on the effectiveness with which the lesson was planned” (p. 103).