LESSON OVERVIEW

With this lesson plan, students learn plenty of useful phrases for presentations in English. They also prepare presentation excerpts, and learn how to start a presentation.

The lesson is the second of the three-part series of lessons about delivering presentations. You will find the first part of the series here and the third part of the series here.

USEFUL PHRASES FOR PRESENTATIONS

The lesson starts with a brief discussion on successful presentations. After that, students match words useful to talk about presentations (e.g. recap, takeaway, breakdown) to their meanings. Then, they read six excerpts from a presentation and decide which of the words studied in the previous exercise the excerpts are examples of. Next, students read four statements and decide if they agree with them or not. The statements refer to the presentation flow. After that, students read sentences and complete them with one word to create useful phrases for presentations (e.g. in a nutshell, let me expand on this point, let’s kick off by). Then, they look at a list of functions and decide which of the phrases from the previous exercise exemplify them. This part of the lesson ends with a rephrasing exercise in which students rewrite sentences to use the newly learnt vocabulary. 

HOW TO START A PRESENTATION

In this part of the lesson, students prepare parts of presentations using relevant phrases from the first part of the lesson. They do that using prompts which describe what their part needs to cover. You can find the prompts on the last pages of the worksheet. Then, they move on to discuss the ways to start a presentation (e.g. by presenting an amazing fact, by telling a story). After that, students read some phrases for presentations and decide which of the discussed techniques they can be used with. Finally, students do a group task. They need to  brainstorm how to effectively start different kinds of presentations (e.g. a sales pitch for a time-management app, a motivational talk about developing new habits).