The Big Dog ESL Comprehensible Input Lesson

The Big Dog ESL Comprehensible Input Lesson – a simple lesson for English language learners with repetitive vocabulary and simplified grammar.

Make learning English fun with this simple, comprehensible input English lesson plan and story. This lesson plan includes a story with targeted structures that can be repeated to give your students lots of repetitions. Comprehension activities to use after the story will allow you to engage your students and make sure that your English lesson is truly comprehensible input.

Julie has a dog, a really big dog. Her dog is causing trouble at school, because he keeps eating her homework. Will she be able to convince her teacher that the dog really is hungry enough to eat her homework? There are four targeted vocabulary structures that are used multiple times throughout the story.

The targeted structures in the Big Dog ESL lesson are:

• ate
• she aks
• doesn’t believe her
• he was hungry

This very simple story is told in two different ways. There is a printable text version, and an animated mp4 version. Tell the story as you watch it (pause if you want to stop and discuss or storyask!), or just watch it for comprehension. The video is just over 5 minutes long, with pause time for students to read the text.

There is a second version of the video with only the illustrations – no text – so you can watch it and do story retells. With novice low and novice mid learners, you can tell the story as is. For novice high learners, you can add more details or write a parallel story. You could even use this story at higher levels by having students retell the story in the past.

Here’s what you’ll get in this The Big Dog ESL Comprehensible Input Lesson:

• Links to the videos both with and without the text

• A printable pdf version of the story

• Comprehension question worksheet

• “Who said it?” worksheet

• Story retell worksheet

• Answer key

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