Lesson aims are one of those things that seem straightforward until you actually try to write one well. The aim, whether effective or vague, shapes every decision you make in the lesson: what activities you choose, how long you spend on each stage, and how you know at the end whether the lesson worked.
This article looks at what makes a lesson aim effective, the different types of aim, and the common mistakes that quietly undermine lessons before they’ve even started.
Why lesson aims matter
A lesson aim isn’t a formality to fill in before the real work starts. It’s the answer to a fundamental question: what do you want your learners to be able to do by the end of this lesson that they couldn’t do – or couldn’t do as well – at the beginning?
Notice it’s about what learners will be able to do, not about what you will cover. A lesson built around what you’ll teach tends to produce teacher-centred activity. A lesson built around what learners will achieve tends to produce something more useful.
Scrivener makes this point well in Learning Teaching (Macmillan), arguing that the central question in lesson planning is what you hope learners will have achieved by the end, and that once you can answer that clearly, the rest of the planning tends to follow. That’s not an overstatement. Once the aim is clear, the right activities, the right sequence, and the right timing become much easier to work out.
The main aim
Every lesson should have one main aim. Not two, not three – one. This is the thing the lesson is primarily designed to achieve, and everything else should contribute towards it.
Main aims in EFL lessons generally fall into one of two categories: language aims and skills aims.
A language aim focuses on a specific grammar point, lexical set, or functional language area. A skills aim focuses on developing one of the four skills – reading, writing, listening, or speaking – or a sub-skill within one of those.
Here are some examples of both:
Language aims:
- To enable students to talk about past habits using used to in the context of childhood memories
- To develop students’ ability to describe people using compound adjectives in the context of describing friends and family
- To enable students to make and respond to suggestions using functional expressions in the context of planning a night out
Skills aims:
- To develop students’ ability to identify the main idea in a spoken text in the context of a radio interview about travel
- To improve students’ ability to skim a written text for gist in the context of newspaper articles about technology
- To give students practice in extended speaking on the topic of food and eating habits
Notice the pattern. All of these begin with to enable, to develop, to improve, or to give students practice in – keeping the focus on the learner and on an outcome, rather than on what the teacher will do. And they all include a context: not just “talk about past habits using used to” but “in the context of childhood memories.” This matters because language doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Specifying the context grounds the aim in something real, and it also helps you plan – once you know the context, the materials, the lead-in, and the speaking activities start to suggest themselves.
Contrast these with the weak versions that appear on many lesson plans:
- To teach used to – this describes what the teacher will do, not what learners will achieve
- To practise reading – this is so broad it’s almost meaningless
- To do activities about the past – this describes content, not purpose
A well-written aim also implies how you’ll know when it’s been achieved. “To enable students to talk about past habits using used to in the context of childhood memories” has a built-in success criterion: during the speaking stage, are learners producing used to appropriately to talk about their childhoods? If yes, the aim has broadly been met. If not, something needs revisiting. A vague aim like “to teach used to” gives you nothing to evaluate against.
Secondary aims
Most lessons will also have one or two secondary aims – other things you want to develop alongside the main focus. These aren’t less important; they just play a supporting role.
If your main aim is grammar-based, your secondary aims might include a skill. For example, if you’re teaching the present perfect through a listening text, a secondary aim might be “to develop students’ ability to listen for specific information.” You were going to use a listening text anyway – the secondary aim makes that stage count for something beyond just context-setting.
Similarly, a skills-based lesson will often generate vocabulary or grammar as a secondary aim. A reading lesson on travel might include a secondary aim of “to introduce and provide practice in vocabulary for describing journeys.”
Secondary aims keep you honest about what each stage of the lesson is actually for. If a stage doesn’t connect to either the main aim or a secondary aim, it probably doesn’t need to be there.
Stage aims
As well as the lesson-level aims, every individual stage of the lesson should also have a clear aim – a short note explaining why this stage exists and what it’s designed to achieve.
Stage aims don’t need to be elaborate. A lead-in stage might have the aim: to activate learners’ prior knowledge of the topic and generate interest. A controlled practice stage: to give learners the opportunity to produce the target structure accurately in a supported context. A freer speaking stage: to give learners the opportunity to use the target language in a more communicative context.
Writing stage aims forces you to interrogate your own lesson plan. If you can’t state why a particular stage is there, that’s a signal to look at it more carefully. Sometimes you’ll find a stage that’s drifted in from habit – a gap-fill you always do, a pair-check that doesn’t actually serve anything – and removing or replacing it makes the lesson tighter and more purposeful.
Personal aims
Less commonly discussed, but genuinely useful are personal aims. These are things you want to develop in yourself as a teacher, separate from the lesson content.
Maybe your boardwork has been disorganised and you want to plan it more carefully this lesson. Maybe you’ve been talking too much during pair work and you want to practise stepping back. Maybe you’re working on giving clearer instructions, or on your use of concept-checking questions.
A useful discipline is to write one personal aim before each lesson for a period of time, then note afterwards whether you achieved it. Over a few weeks, this kind of focused self-monitoring does more for your development than observation alone.
Common mistakes in writing lesson aims
Aiming at activities rather than outcomes
To do a role play about booking a hotel room is an activity description, not an aim. The aim is what the role play is designed to achieve: to give students practice in using functional language for making requests and responding to queries. Activities are the means; aims are the ends. When you mix the two up, you end up with lessons where you can tick off activities without knowing whether learning has happened.
Writing aims that are too broad
To improve students’ speaking is technically an aim, but it’s so broad that almost anything counts as evidence of achieving it. A useful aim is specific enough that you could observe whether it’s been met by the end of the lesson. To give students practice in giving and justifying opinions on a familiar topic is specific. To improve speaking isn’t.
Writing aims that are too narrow
The opposite problem also exists. To enable students to use the contraction it’s correctly in writing is so narrow it barely warrants a whole lesson. Aims should be substantial enough to justify the time invested. If the aim can be achieved in five minutes, it’s a stage aim, not a lesson aim.
Setting more than one main aim
Teachers sometimes write two main aims because the lesson genuinely feels like it’s doing two things. Usually, on closer inspection, one of those things is actually serving the other, which makes it a secondary aim. Occasionally the lesson really is trying to do two separate things, in which case it’s probably trying to do too much. Splitting it into two cleaner lessons, or prioritising ruthlessly, tends to produce better outcomes than trying to honour two equally weighted aims in the same hour.
Ignoring the connection to previous and future lessons
A lesson aim shouldn’t exist in isolation. It should connect to what came before, building on language learners have already encountered, revisiting a skill they’ve been developing, and to what comes next. This is sometimes called timetable fit. A lesson that introduces the second conditional in week four and never revisits it, because the aims of weeks five and six were planned in isolation, is a missed opportunity. Aims planned as part of a sequence produce more durable learning than aims planned as standalone events.
Knowing when the aim has been achieved
One of the most useful habits to develop is asking yourself, before the lesson: how will I know if this aim has been achieved?
The answer doesn’t need to be elaborate. For a grammar aim, you might decide that you’ll observe learners using the target structure during the freer practice stage, without prompting, in a communicative context. For a skills aim, you might decide that learners will be able to complete a specific task successfully. The point is to have something concrete to look for, so that your post-lesson reflection is grounded in evidence rather than impression.
This connects to what Harmer describes in The Practice of English Language Teaching (Pearson) as planning from the learner’s perspective – working backwards from the end point and asking what learners will need to have done in order to get there. When aims are written this way, lesson planning becomes a coherent process rather than a sequence of activities assembled in the hope that learning will emerge.
A quick reference: aims at a glance
| Type | What it covers | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Main aim | The primary learning outcome of the lesson | To enable students to discuss future plans using will and going to in the context of travel arrangements |
| Secondary aim | A learning outcome that supports or complements the main aim | To develop students’ ability to listen for specific information |
| Stage aim | The purpose of an individual lesson stage | To activate prior knowledge and generate interest in the topic |
| Personal aim | Something the teacher wants to develop in their own practice | To give clearer instructions by modelling the activity before asking students to begin |
A final thought
Well-written lesson aims aren’t just administrative. They’re a discipline that keeps teaching purposeful – a constant reminder that the lesson exists for the learners, not for the teacher, and that what matters isn’t what was covered but what was learned.
Getting into the habit of writing clear, learner-focused aims takes a little effort at first, but teachers who do it consistently plan more efficiently, reflect more usefully, and develop more quickly.
References
Harmer, J. (2015) The Practice of English Language Teaching (5th ed.). Pearson.
Scrivener, J. (2011) Learning Teaching (3rd ed.). Macmillan.
