LESSON OVERVIEW

In this lesson, students reflect on ways to make a business meeting more productive and practise some useful phrases for business meetings. They also act out typical workplace situations.

BUSINESS MEETING VIDEO & DISCUSSION

The lesson starts with a discussion on business meetings and some factors that make them unproductive. Then, students watch a video showing a business meeting and check if any obstacles they mentioned earlier made it unproductive. Next, they focus on six gapped extracts from the video and try to complete them with the correct forms of seven given verbs. After that, they watch the video again and check what the reactions to comments in the previous exercise were. The listening part is followed by another discussion in which students share their ideas on how the meeting could’ve been made more productive.

PHRASES FOR BUSINESS MEETINGS & ROLE-PLAY

The following task introduces the definition of meeting facilitation. Students discuss the function and talk about the necessary skills a good meeting facilitator should have. Next, they match twelve half phrases to create steps in facilitating meetings (e.g. set an agenda, monitor progress). They analyse the steps and discuss in what way they’d make a business meeting productive. Afterwards, students focus on nine phrases for business meetings which they have to complete with the missing prepositions (e.g. I would like to point out that, I’d like to get your feedback on…). They also decide what the purpose of each of them is. In the next task, students need to imagine that they’re meeting facilitators. To put the phrases for business meetings into practice, they’re given seven typical business meeting situations. They have to decide what they would say in each of them by replacing the underlined items with the words in brackets. The lesson finishes with a group role play. Students imagine they’re having a weekly status update meeting and need to follow the instructions on a card given by their teacher (they might be a meeting facilitator or another team member). In each case, they’re given a list of phrases which they have to use and a list of topics to discuss.

student’s versionteacher’s versione-lesson plan