Free lesson plan, worksheet and audio – ‘At the pharmacy’

Download the free PDF and Power Point slides below and use the worksheet to help your students learn vocabulary and practise their listening and speaking through a lesson all about visiting the pharmacy.

I’m going to use this to supplement unit 13 of Read and Write every day. The Power Point slides include the audio (it’s embedded) or you can access it here (recording 6 – At the pharmacy). This audio is taken from the Read and Write Upper series aimed at beginners but I think it will be fine for my pre-entry group as I have designed a simple task for them while listening (see below). As the old adage goes, ‘grade the task, not the text.’ The PDF includes a lesson plan too. There’s some homework, including a video on the My My Homework Today You Tube channel.

Listening practice with pre-entry groups is not at all straightforward. If you look at listening comprehension tasks in course books aimed at beginners, they might feature texts of 30 words or more in which the learners are required to write ten or more words! The amount of reading and writing proves so difficult that the students end up practising nothing at all.

So what’s the solution to this? The material for this lesson involves giving the comprehension task orally. The key to this is that you don’t give them too many questions (three is about right) and they should be simple enough for the learners to be able to keep them in their minds while listening. In addition, the answers to these questions need to be short as the learners need to be able to remember them while on task and during feedback.

The alternative to this strategy is to set a listening task with pictures for the learners to tick. For instance, there is a listening task in unit 14 of the Read and Write every day course book where the students listen to a conversation in a clothes shop. The students tick pictures of the items the shoppers buy.

Please do comment below to let me know if the material proves of any use and to give me some feedback. If you have anything to add to my views on listening lessons at this level then please add your opinion to the comments.