ESL Lesson Plan Template: How to Plan a Four-Skills Lesson in 60 Minutes
Search for an ESL lesson plan template and you mostly get a form: date, class, objective, materials, procedure, with boxes to fill. A form helps you remember what to write down, but it doesn't help you decide what the lesson should contain. The harder question, every time, is how to fit speaking, listening, reading and writing into one lesson so that each one sets up the next.
This page gives you a structure for that: a 60-minute template built around one topic, in which the four skills take turns, plus a worked B1 example and links to ready-made, free activities for each stage. Everything linked is free to use without an account.
Why plan around one topic
A lesson that gives each skill its own unrelated topic (a listening about airports, a reading about cheese, a writing about your weekend) makes students start from zero four times. A lesson that keeps one topic does the opposite: the listening gives them ideas and vocabulary, the reading deepens it, the speaking lets them use it, and the writing lets them keep it.
That's what "integrated skills" means in practice. It isn't four exercises glued together; it's a chain in which the output of one stage is the input to the next. The template below is built as that chain.
The 60-minute template
| Minutes | Stage | Skill | What happens |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0–5 | Warm-up | speaking | quick-fire questions on the topic; no extended answers |
| 5–15 | Input 1 | listening | one short listening, gist then detail |
| 15–30 | Input 2 | reading | a passage on the same topic, questions in pairs |
| 30–45 | Output 1 | speaking | a task that needs the language from both texts |
| 45–55 | Output 2 | writing | a short written task, same topic, same level |
| 55–60 | Close | all | one thing to remember; one thing to fix |
Read the middle column down and you'll see the pattern: receive, receive, produce, produce. The two input stages come first because students can't produce language they haven't met. The two output stages come second, spoken before written, because speaking is the cheaper rehearsal: a student who has said a sentence aloud twice is much more likely to write it correctly.
The timings are a starting point. A lower-level class will need longer on each stage and fewer of them. Plan three stages for an A1 or A2 class, and drop one of the input stages rather than shortening them all.
Stage by stage
Warm-up (5 minutes). The goal is to get everyone speaking in English and pointed at the topic. Use questions that can be answered in a breath, going round the room: "Do you ever cook for other people?" rather than "Describe a meal that was important to you." The 100 ESL warm-up questions are sorted by CEFR level for exactly this. For other ways to start a class, see four ways to start class in English.
Listening (10 minutes). Play or read one short text, twice. The first time is for gist, with a single question on the board. The second time is for detail, with three or four questions. Resist the urge to play it a third time and then explain the answers: if a question can't be answered after two listenings, the text was too hard or the question was.
If you haven't got audio on the topic, you have three options. You can read a short script aloud yourself, and slowly: that's still real listening practice, and it lets you repeat a phrase on request. You can use a recording you already have. Or you can make a lesson from a topic in Listening, no kidding, which writes the script, records it in a voice that matches the speaker, and produces comprehension questions from gist to inference at the CEFR level you pick. It can also run the questions live, with students answering on their phones.
Reading (15 minutes). Students read one passage on the same topic and answer the questions in pairs, then you go through only the answers where pairs disagree. The first minute matters most: ask for the gist before they look at any question. 12 graded passages with questions and answers are ready to use from A1 to C2. If you want to build your own, how to design comprehension questions explains what each question type tests.
Speaking (15 minutes). This is the payoff stage, and it's the one most often squeezed. The task must need language from the two input stages, or students will fall back on whatever they already know. A good output task has an information gap or an opinion gap: two students each hold different information and must share it, or they must agree on a ranking, a plan or a decision. 200 conversation questions by CEFR level give you topic-sorted discussion prompts. For something more structured, no-prep speaking activities covers the activity types that work for each level.
Writing (10 minutes). Keep it short and keep it on the same topic. At A1 and A2 this is two or three sentences; from B1 up, a short paragraph. The point is to let students put down what they just said, while it's fresh. 60 writing prompts by CEFR level each give a text type, a target length and a Look for line that tells you what to check. If marking is a bottleneck, collect only the first sentence of each student's paragraph and give feedback on that, which is a lot faster than reading every script.
Close (5 minutes). End on one thing worth remembering and one thing to fix. Pick the single language point you heard go wrong most often during the speaking stage and put three example sentences on the board. Students correct them in pairs. It's quick, and it turns your own listening into the day's feedback.
A worked example: B1, "planning a weekend trip"
Here's how the template looks for a B1 adult class.
- Warm-up: "Do you like travelling with other people or on your own?" "What's the best weekend away you've had?" Go round the room.
- Listening: a two-minute conversation between friends deciding where to go. First listening: Where do they decide to go? Second listening: three detail questions (the cost, the transport, the disagreement).
- Reading: a 130-word passage about a weekend away that went wrong, with five questions that include one multiple-choice paraphrase question and one inference question.
- Speaking: pairs plan a weekend trip together on a budget, agree on one place, one way of getting there and one thing to avoid, then tell another pair.
- Writing: a short message of about 100 words to a friend inviting them, with the plan, the price and a reason to say yes.
- Close: the three sentences from the speaking stage that used the wrong tense or preposition.
Notice what the topic does at every stage. The vocabulary from the conversation (book, budget, get there, cost) appears in the passage, is needed in the speaking, and is written in the message. That repetition across skills is what makes a four-skills lesson stick, and a plan that only changes topic between stages doesn't get it.
Adapting the template
For adults. Choose topics close to their lives: work, travel, money, decisions about time. Cut the warm-up to three minutes and spend the extra two on the speaking stage, since adult classes tend to want more talking and less setup. 32 ESL activities for adults has speaking tasks built around real adult situations.
For teenagers. Shorten every stage by a couple of minutes and add movement to one of them, such as a standing speaking task. Keep the topic concrete and a little competitive.
For mixed levels. Keep the topic and the sequence, but give students different texts at different levels. Everyone does the same warm-up and the same speaking task; the reading passages and the writing prompts are the two stages where you can easily differentiate.
When grammar is the focus. Replace the second input stage with a short, targeted grammar task and keep the rest. For instance, irregular verb exercises with answers fit a past-tense lesson, placed between the reading and the speaking so students use the forms straight after practising them. No-materials vocabulary games make a good five-minute filler if a stage runs short.
Keeping the plan once you've written it
The first time you plan a lesson this way it takes longer than it looks. The second time you use the same plan with another class it takes five minutes. Save the structure, the topic and the materials together, so next term you change the level and the examples, not the whole plan. Saving assignments as templates shows one way to do that for the reading and writing stages.
If you'd like the listening, reading and writing stages built for you at any CEFR level, there's one free plan with no credit card, and one subscription (€15 a month) that covers the whole suite: Speaking, Listening and Writing, with Reading joining later this year at no extra cost. See the plans. Everything linked on this page stays free regardless.
FAQ
How long should an ESL lesson plan be? Long enough to write down the stages and the timings, and short enough to use. One page is plenty: the topic, the level, the aim of each stage and what students produce at the end. If a plan runs to several pages it will probably be ignored in the lesson.
What are the four skills in ESL? Speaking, listening, reading and writing. Listening and reading are the receptive skills (students take language in); speaking and writing are the productive skills (students put language out). A four-skills lesson uses all of them, ideally in an order where the receptive stages come first.
Do I have to use all four skills in every lesson? No. A 45-minute lesson with a lower-level class is usually better with three stages done well than four done in a rush. What matters is that the stages share a topic and that the last stage lets students use what the earlier ones gave them.
Can I use this template for online lessons? Yes. The structure doesn't depend on the room. For one-to-one or small online groups, shorten the warm-up and let the speaking stage take more of the time, since each student gets far more talking time than in a large class.
Written by Prof. Vito Schiuma, designer of English, no kidding.