LESSON OVERVIEW

What’s the difference between a trend and a fad? How do they affect business? Should companies ignore fads or try to exploit them? This and more in this Business English lesson. This lesson plan focuses on listening comprehension and speaking skills. You will have a chance to watch a short video about trends and fads and discuss with students what they think a fad is now and what could be a trend. Apart from the listening comprehension tasks, you will show your students some vocabulary for predicting and expressing likelihood which will help them talk about trends. This worksheet was prepared for Business English students, especially those who work in the e-commerce and digital advertising businesses. If your students are not into the online world, you might need to change the last exercise and add some other examples of trends and fads.

WARM-UP

The lesson starts with a warm-up activity on what trends and fads are. Let your students discover the difference between those 2 phenomena by matching them to their features. Afterwards, you might want to ask your students to create a short dictionary definition of both a trend and a fad. This will help them better understand these 2 concepts.

VIDEO (LISTENING COMPREHENSION)

This segment of the lesson consists of 2 listening comprehension tasks: one focused on listening for the main idea and the other on listening for specific vocabulary. Before you start watching the video, your students will first try to answer the questions so that they can predict what the video might be about. Next, they watch the video and compare their answers to what the speaker in the video says. Then, students watch the video again, but this time they need to listen for specific words to fill in the gaps. This task is divided into 2 parts not to overwhelm your students.

DISCUSSION (EXPRESSING LIKELIHOOD)

The last part of the lesson focuses on talking about trends and fads from a business perspective. First, your students get a list of phrases that can be used for expressing likelihood. Go through those expressions with your students and let them decide what level of certainty each of them expresses. It’s also a good opportunity to elicit from your students other ways of expressing likelihood (e.g. modal verbs). Finally, the last task is all about using new language in speech and critically assessing different trends and fads.