LESSON OVERVIEW

This lesson plan looks at the modern office spaces and the cool amenities there are in the office right now. Your students will discover Facebook’s London office and what it looks like. They’ll also have a chance to discuss whether those extra facilities boost work efficiency, which ones are actually practical and which just look nice on paper.

The aim of the lesson is to practise speaking skills with a work-related topic, but the worksheet also includes listening comprehension and vocabulary tasks.

WARM-UP

The worksheet starts with two warm-up tasks that introduce the topic but also get your students talking and practising their speaking skills. In the first one, they need to read and exchange their opinions about some quotes related to the workspace. They present various ideas on what your work environment should be like. In the second task, they need to collaborate and negotiate to create a ranking of most useful office amenities. Before this task, you might want to elicit some of the things they currently have in their offices and extend the list to introduce more vocabulary and let them choose top10 from a longer list.

VIDEO

Before watching the video, ask your students whether they have seen or heard what the office space of big tech companies look like. Ask them to predict what kind of facilities they expect to see at Facebook’s London office. Create a common list on the board which you’ll later confront with that shown in the video. Exercise 3 is a listening comprehension task. It includes 6 questions for which your students need to find answers. Depending on your class level, you have two ways of approaching this task:

• Let them read the questions before you play the video. Then, watch the video and ask them to make notes as they watch it;
• Watch the video once. Afterwards, let them answer the questions in accordance with what they heard and play the video again so that they can check their answers and fill in any gaps.

POST-VIDEO VOCABULARY

After watching the video and doing the comprehension task, your students will learn some new vocabulary taken from the video. There is an extra challenge in this fill-in-the-gaps activity (exercise 4). Your students not only need to put the words in the right gap but also think about the grammar structure and change the forms of the verbs.

The next task is designed to reinforce newly-learnt vocab by using it first in a writing activity and then in an oral task. Students will have to use some of the new words to describe their own office spaces and then exchange their descriptions and get more details from each other. Want to practise reported speech? It’s a perfect chance to mix the pairs and ask them to tell each other what their previous partners said.

DISCUSSION

The lesson finishes with some discussion points. Divide your class into small groups (3-4 people) and ask them to discuss the provided questions. Encourage your students to use the vocabulary they’ve learnt in the previous tasks. All the discussion points focus on modern workplaces, their design and impact on employees. Enjoy!

ROLEPLAY: PROJECT CHILLOUT ROOM (PDF-ONLY)

If you want to get your students to do some group work and practise their teamworking, negotiation and collaboration skills, consider using our case study. This activity contains a group task in which they need to roleplay being involved in a project focused on developing a new break room for a fictitious company. Your students will be constrained by user requirements and limited budget so that they have to reach a compromise and decide what the break room should look like. We love this kind of tasks for Business English students as a relatable background info, clear requirements and goals make them cooperate, and it simulates a type of real-life discussion they might be involved in later.

You can find the handout for the case study in the Teacher’s Version pdf.