5.4 Planning a Sequence of Lessons: Assumptions, Timetable Fit, and Common Sequences

5.4 Planning a Sequence of Lessons: Assumptions, Timetable Fit, and Common Sequences

TKT Module 2 Part 1 asks candidates to plan "an individual lesson or a sequence of lessons". Candidates who revise only single-lesson staging lose marks on items about where a lesson sits inside a longer plan, and on the two plan components examiners most often set against each other: assumptions and timetable fit.

The Planning Hierarchy: Syllabus, Scheme of Work, Lesson Plan

TKT distinguishes three planning documents by scope and by author.

A syllabus is the official specification of what is to be taught on a course: language items, skills, topics, level descriptors and examination targets. It is normally issued by a ministry, an examination board or a school's academic management rather than by the classroom teacher, and it says nothing about Tuesday's warmer.

A scheme of work (or long-term plan) is the teacher's or department's plan of lessons across a term, semester or course. It converts the syllabus into a dated grid: lesson numbers, dates, topics, target language, skills, materials, revision points and assessment points. A typical entry reads: "Week 6, Lessons 11-12: Unit 4, past simple regular and irregular; reading, a holiday blog; Progress Test 2 in Lesson 12."

A lesson plan is the short-term document for one class: aims, assumptions, anticipated problems, timing, procedure, interaction patterns and materials (see 5.2).

Assumptions Are Not Anticipated Problems

Assumptions state what the teacher believes learners already know or can already do before the lesson begins: prior grammar, known vocabulary, familiarity with a task type, or relevant world knowledge. They justify why the plan can start where it starts. Anticipated problems state what learners are likely to find difficult during the lesson, and each is paired with a solution (see 5.3).

For a single B1 lesson on the present perfect with for and since:

• Assumption: "Learners can form the past simple accurately and know the past participles of the twelve verbs on the worksheet."
• Assumption: "Learners have done information-gap pairwork before, so instructions can be brief."
• Anticipated problem: "Learners will use the past simple for unfinished time, producing I lived here for five years."
• Solution: "Use a timeline on the board and check with a concept question: Do I still live here? Yes."

The examiner's trap is that a wrong assumption creates a problem, so weak candidates write the same idea twice. Keep the glossary wording in mind: an assumption states what the teacher believes learners will or will not already know, or how they will behave, before the lesson begins — so an assumption can be negative ("learners will not have met the third conditional") or behavioural ("this class will settle quickly after the warmer"). An anticipated problem is a prediction of a specific difficulty during the lesson, and it always carries a solution.

Timetable Fit

Timetable fit describes how the lesson connects to what came before and what comes next. On a plan it is one or two sentences: "This is Lesson 3 of 5 in Unit 4. In Lesson 2 learners met the target vocabulary receptively in a reading text; today they use it productively. Lesson 4 recycles it in a writing task, and it is tested in the end-of-unit progress test in Lesson 5."

The tested core of the definition is narrow: timetable fit is how a lesson fits logically into the sequence of lessons in a timetable — what came before and what comes next. Strong plans usually add three further references that are good practice rather than part of the definition: the coursebook unit being followed, the syllabus point or exam objective being served, and the school calendar (holidays, examination weeks, report deadlines). Examiners test it because it is the clearest evidence that a teacher is planning a course rather than a string of unconnected hours, and it is what makes recycling, revision and staged difficulty possible.

Five Common Sequences

Cambridge lists "common sequences, e.g. structures, skills, topic, project". Each organises several lessons around a different spine.

Structural (grammatical) sequence. Forms are graded from simple to complex. Lesson 1: present simple affirmative for routines. Lesson 2: negatives and questions. Lesson 3: adverbs of frequency. Lesson 4: present simple contrasted with present continuous. Lesson 5: freer speaking and review.

Skills-based sequence. A receptive text feeds a productive outcome. Lesson 1: listening to a radio report on city transport. Lesson 2: reading an article on the same theme. Lesson 3: note-taking and a group discussion. Lesson 4: writing a 150-word opinion paragraph.

Topic (theme-based) sequence. Lessons share a topic and its lexical set while the language focus changes. A Food and Health sequence might cover food vocabulary, then countable and uncountable nouns with quantifiers, then reading about diets, then a restaurant role-play.

Functional sequence. Lessons are organised by communicative purpose. A Travel Survival sequence supplies exponents for asking for directions, buying a ticket, checking into a hotel, and complaining about a room, one function per lesson.

Project-based sequence. Lessons converge on a product or outcome: planning a class travel guide, researching and drafting sections, peer-editing, then presenting and displaying it. Language is taught as the project demands it.

Progression Across a Sequence

Sequences are judged on progression, not variety. Four principles recur in Module 2 items.

• Recycling and revision. Target language reappears in later lessons in new contexts, and a scheme of work marks revision points deliberately instead of hoping for them.
• Increasing learner independence. Heavy scaffolding, models and controlled frames come early; less support and more learner decision-making come later.
• Spacing of new input. New items are distributed across lessons rather than crammed into one, leaving room for practice.
• Accuracy to fluency across the sequence. An early lesson may be accuracy-focused in its entirety and a later one fluency-focused; the continuum stretches over lessons, not only inside one.

Deriving Lesson Aims from Sequence Aims

The sequence aim, or unit aim, is the destination; each lesson's main aim is one leg of the journey, and each stage aim serves that lesson aim (see 5.1). If the sequence aim is "by the end of the unit learners can describe a past holiday in a 120-word blog post", then Lesson 1 targets past simple irregular verbs, Lesson 2 targets holiday lexis, Lesson 3 targets reading a model blog for organisation, and Lesson 4 is the writing itself. Every lesson aim should be traceable upwards to the sequence aim and downwards to its stage aims, and that traceability is what Module 2 planning tasks reward.