Tested ESL Lesson Plans & Help 

ESL lesson plans offers you some of my favorite, tried-and-true lessons. Check them out for ideas if you're an ESL or EFL teacher .

ESL Lesson Plans & Resources: pictures of a teacher with his ESL class & of 3 students working together. Text: Communicative lessons for adult ESL classes, with links to resources & planning tips

The lesson plans below, for ESL students of different levels, demonstrate some of the skills that can help you plan a good lesson.

(Some use slightly different formats as I wrote them for different purposes. Unless your school requires a certain format, use the features that you find most helpful.)

Beginning (or Multi-Level) Lesson Plans

Intermediate ESL Lesson Plans

  • Reading Comprehension Lesson Plans include several lessons on diseases in world history. Besides the reading selections & comp. questions, there are videos & a web quest. They take from 1-2 days to 2 weeks and cost from $2.00- 8.00. (The $8.00 packet includes all the lessons.) Two Word Detective packets teach important comprehension skills like decoding and inferences. There are also free lesson plans. 

High Intermediate to Advanced Plans

ESL teacher talking to her students at a long table.

I'd suggest modifying these (or any) lesson plans to meet the particular needs of your class. I don’t think I ever taught the same lesson twice without modifications. Still, they can save time and maybe inspire other ideas.

Free Lesson Plans from Other Sites

I've come across many sites with excellent ESL lesson plans-- too many to list here. But I was impressed by the variety of lesson plans (& sites) suggested by 64 Free Lesson Plans. Some are more useful than others, but if you're not sure where to find a certain type of lesson, it's a place to start. You just might find a site you'll use repeatedly!

My Favorite (& Free!) ESL Lesson Planning Resource 

Here's the single most helpful resource for adult ESL lesson plans that I have used-- and it’s free!  Another teacher shared it with me, and for years I didn’t know that it was available online... My students and I have found many of these lessons especially helpful.  

The L.A. Unified’s Tools for ESL Lesson Planning has great explanations of the most useful ESL techniques. It also has 35 (2 1/2 hour) sample adult ESL lesson plans. It is a 176-page pdf, so allow a little while for it to load. 

There’s one plan each for 5 different levels in 7 competency areas:

  • personal information/interaction, 
  • consumer education, 
  • community, 
  • health and safety, 
  • occupational knowledge, 
  • civics, and 
  • learning skills. 

They provide clear plans and two reproducible hand-outs for each lesson.

These lessons are designed for adults living in the U.S. Most would be easy to adapt for other English-speaking countries or EFL classes. Quite a few would work for younger students as well. 

I have tried (and/or combined/modified) more than half of them and highly recommend them. If you have a much shorter class time, it's not hard to shorten them, or divide them into 2 lessons.

My favorite lessons from them:

Beginning Low:

  • “Are you feeling OK?”

Beginning  High:

  • “What do we need at the store?”   
  • “What’s Shaking?”

Intermediate Low

  • “I need to report a crime!”  
  • “She Can’t Breathe!” 
  • “First, insert the originals”

Intermediate High:

  • “Fill out a medical (history) form.” This lesson is reviewing the present perfect tense. So another good warm-up is a “Find someone who has _____..." (Fill in the blanks with "had a particular disease," "broken a bone," "had a vaccination," etc.) If you;re making it into two lessons, this might be the first. Students could role-play  interviews with ‘the doctor’ for a second lesson              
  • "Get the job!" (an interview)

Advanced Low:

  • “America the Beautiful”

I’d recommend printing the sections of the pdf that you intend to use. That way it’s handy when you want to refer to a particular lesson or print some handouts.  

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Where to go next? Check out ESL Worksheets. It has free and inexpensive lessons, exercises, and games. There are exercises for vocabulary, roots and affixes, irregular verbs, +. (Some lessons have integrated reading/writing as well.) 

Planning ESL Lessons > ESL Lesson Plans

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