A Lesson Plan on Adjectives for Adults Learning English as a Foreign Language (EFL)

Teaching adults English as a Foreign Language (EFL) is a rapidly expanding market, yet finding free EFL (or ESL) lesson plans on the internet for adults is very difficult. Most EFL websites either don’t have any, or they charge a fee for them. I teach EFL to adults in Thailand and I have a whole library of EFL lesson plans for adult learners in my head so I decided to share them with you. Adult learners get bored easily if the subject they are studying is too easy or too difficult. They also, surprisingly, get bored if EFL class is too serious, so I also try to include a game in my lessons now and again. Here is a good Adjectives lesson plan for adult EFL learners that you can adapt to any students from beginner level all the way up to advanced level. Your students should have already studied some adjectives and be able to name at least 50 adjectives.

Expected Learning Outcome – Students will learn how to describe things and people in an appropriate and imaginatively descriptive manner. They will review known English adjectives as well as learn new adjectives.

Materials and Resources – Whiteboard markers, handout listing all the adjectives the students have already studied as well as a list of new adjectives.

Teaching Procedure:

Step One: Start by recapping what an adjective is and how to use one (“An adjective is a word, phrase or clause that describes a noun by answering one of three questions – What kind is it? How many of them are there?, Which one is it?)

Step Two: Ask each student to describe their house or a person in their family using the adjectives they already know. Each student is only allowed one minute to describe the subject they have been given, using as many adjectives as they can. (EFL students, even advanced level students, do find this difficult, so don’t be surprised if they have only managed to think of two sentences in a minute).

Step Three: Once each student has finished their descriptions, describe to them your house or a person in your family, to give them an example of how to use adjectives to describe something. (I describe my house in the United States and then, after I have finished the description, I show them photographs of the house and ask them if what I described made them think of a house like this or something different. It’s surprising how many of them actually did picture a house quite similar.

Step Four: Give out the adjectives list handout you have prepared (or find a list from the internet as there are many lists out there and most of them are free). Go over the adjectives they already know asking each student to create a sentence using one of the adjectives on the list. Then go over the adjectives on the list that are new for your students and describe what each adjective means. Ask students to create sentences using some of these words, to make sure they are understanding the meanings correctly.

Step Five: Now for the game. Put your students into teams (or one student against another if, like me, you sometimes only have two adult EFL students in a class). Explain to your students that you will give them a subject and then they will have 1-2 minutes (depending on the class time you have left) to come up with as many adjectives as they can think of that will describe that subject. For beginner level adult EFL classes you can allow them to use the handout you just gave them. For advanced level, make them think of adjectives without using the list. I come up with subjects like 1) a man, 2) a woman, 3) a movie, 4) a car, 5) a tie, 6) a dress, 7) Hong Kong, 8) Bangkok, 9) your job 10) a vacation – but you can use pretty much any subject you can think of. Run this game for 10 to 20 minutes depending on the concentration level of your students and class time remaining. The team (or student) that gets the most adjectives wins a prize (I usually give out a bag of potato chips or chocolate – my adult EFL learners love chocolate!)

Step Six: Ask students if they have any questions (mine always have two or three, which I always answer, even if they’re not remotely connected to the subject we’ve just studied).

Step Seven: If you assign homework, you can assign a short essay for each student to write using the adjectives you’ve covered in class. I don’t assign homework in my corporate adult EFL classes, but some companies do want their employees to study English at home also.

If your class size is not too large, you should be able to complete this lesson plan in an hour. At the end of it, your students should be able to describe any known English noun with some degree of accuracy and imagination.

Evaluation/Assessment: 1. participation in class, 2. students’ ability to create appropriate adjectives sentences in class, 3. ability to work in pairs or as a team member.

This is a great lesson plan for EFL adult students and ESL adult students. You can tailor it to many levels, and they’ll have fun describing things (especially if you give them topics like your boyfriend, your dream woman, your boss, your job etc.). They will also learn some new vocabulary.