Comments on Jason Anderson’s “Affordance, Learning Opportunities, and the Lesson Plan Pro Formaâ€

Anderson’s central concern in his ELT Journal article (Vol. 69, No. 3, 2015) is to introduce several helpful changes teachers can make to a regular lesson plan pro forma due to a particular language learning environment and unpredictable events. In introducing these changes, Anderson discusses affordance, learning objectives, and learning opportunities. Affordance is a jargon term, and those who use it should explain and illustrate it in words that everyone can understand. However, Anderson does not explain it very clearly for his readers. Moreover, in Anderson’s entire article, he does not directly tell readers what he means by pro forma plans, also causing difficulties for some readers. What’s more, the logic of changing learning objectives to learning opportunities is questionable. In this paper, the author tries to make the terms “affordance and pro forma†much clearer and give a specific example of lesson pro forma, which aims at helping readers integrate affordance into lesson plan pro forma much better.