ESA - Engage, Study and Activate
The elements - Engage, Study and Activate (ESA) - are necessary for successful language learning in classrooms. These ESA elements need to be present in most lessons or teaching sequences. Students always need to be Engaged, if possible, so that they can get the maximum out of the learning experience. If the main focus of the lesson is a piece of grammar there will be opportunities for Study and Activation. If the focus is on reading there may be a lot of Activation of language knowledge in the processing of the text, but at some stage, the students will also study the construction of that text or the use of some language within it).
Most students will want to have studied some aspect of language, however small or of short duration, during a lesson period. There are some exceptions to this, of course, notably in classes where an Activation exercise takes up a lot of time, such as with a debate or a role-play or a piece of extended writing. In such cases, teachers may not want to interrupt the flow of Activation with a Study stage. But they will want to use the exercise as a basis for previous or subsequent study of language aspects which are crucial to the activity.
Engage
Teachers try to arouse the students' interest, thus involving their emotions.
• games (depending on age and type)
• music
• discussions (when handled challengingly)
• stimulating pictures
• dramatic stories
• amusing anecdotes
Ask students what they think of a topic before asking them to read about it, for example. They will look at the picture of a person and be asked to guess what their occupation is before they listen to that person on tape
They will be stimulated when the teacher (who normally dresses very formally and always stays in the same place in class) suddenly arrives in class dressed casually and moves around the room with unaccustomed ease
Study
Study activities are those where the students are asked to focus in on...