Lesson Plans: Functional Language

Positive feedback and negative feedback listening and speaking activities.

How academic discussions change from culture to culture, including useful language for doing so.

More complicated phrases for leading academic discussions card games.

Helping seminar participants participate fully phrases review.

More complex academic English functional language card games

Giving examples phrases practice with AWL vocabulary for EAP classes

Good academic writing and the language to do it classroom activities.

Differences in academic writing conventions and language, including lots of useful phrases for writing essays and published papers in English.

Typical mistakes in academic emails, essays, dissertations and papers speaking task.

Pros and cons of technology that might happen in the future discussion

Making personal sentences about favourites with different letters of the alphabet dice game.

Being sympathetic and not in conversational reactions listening and speaking, with useful phrases.

Students ask each other about how and why they need English, do pairwork practice of those kinds of realistic communciations, then brainstorm useful language for typical emails, phone calls and face to face communication.

Common mistakes in emailing, telephoning, meetings, etc pairwork speaking.

Using your body to reinforce typical presentations phrases review

Typical mistakes with common presentations phrases

A fun game with points for negotiating well, linking to how to prepare a presentation

Listening to and classifying typical telephoning phrases game, including typical telephoning confusions.

Pairwork needs analysis, and discussing and practising top priorities.

Making rude ending presentations phrases more and more formal speaking game, including ranking phrases and generalising about formality.

How to make requests more polite/ formal practice

More complex and effective negotiating phrases practice through a jigsaw activity and other card games, including two brainstorming stages.

Using and remembering making proposals phrases for negotiating practice, including a fun responses card game.

Describing companies when you meet someone lying game, with useful phrases, key words and names of famous companies to talk about.

Smoothly moving from topic to topic in meetings review, including speaking games.

A fun negotiating pairwork speaking game with a winner, including useful discussion of how to prepare for external negotiations, and an optional extension into talking about how to prepare for other things.

Students work their way around a fun board game by using useful functional language for internal and external negotiations, then brainstorm what typical phrases they could have used.

Small groups of students work together to find typical errors in the most useful negotiating phrases, then try to remember functional language.

Fun TPR practice of typical functional language for negotiations, including actions to accompany phrases for starting negotiations, responding in negotiations, and ending negotiations.

Positive, negative and ambiguous responses in negotiations review, with a simplest responses games, brainstorming with key words, and using key words in negotiating roleplays.

Students split and sort out cut up and mixed up formal and casual negotiations, analyse the language in them, test each other on the phrases, then roleplay internal and external negotiations with people they know and don't know.

Using the most common telephoning phrases in roleplay phone calls.

Good presentations tips and language

Students memorise and practise the most useful phrases for beginning and ending negotiations, starting with a fun quick responses listening game, then using key words to remember each phrase.

Beginning and finishing business and academic presentations phrases review

Negotiating with people inside your company and outside your company free speaking, including suggested topics and people to negotiate with (suppliers, your boss, etc).

Meetings on HR roleplays board game

Christmas vocabulary practice through restaurant roleplays.

Christmas vocabulary and shopping phrases practice, good for travel English in end of year lessons, with useful food and drink vocabulary.

Practising strong and weak recommendations language, appearance collocations and typical confusions between clothese and appearance words with a fun speaking task.

Phrases to politely disagree with "but" review.

Students put a making and responding to questions conversation in order, memorise it, analyse the language, then take part in similar exchanges.

Students match typical replies to unhappy customers, then try to remember useful phrases for apologising, promising future action, etc.

Students match typical replies to people asking for favours and information, then test each other on useful phrases for polite requests, polite negative responses, etc.

Similar and different looking at both sides phrases

Similar and different ways of describing how to get somewhere

Describing presentation slides phrases presentation and practice

Seven different games to practise vocabulary and phrases for describing how things work, especially use for IELTS Academic classes and Technical English students.

Similar but not identical conversational reaction phrases

A fun giving basic directions game, practising turn right, go straight ahead, etc with a memory card game.