Would you mind rearranging the meeting?

This ESL lesson aims to teach students how to speak professionally and politely in a work environment. The main skills considered are: formal vs informal vocabulary, direct vs more polite questions, and common collocations using ‘make’ and ‘do.’

Warm-up discussion

As a warm-up activity, the student discusses different situations in which they use formal and informal manners of speaking.

Casual vs. professional speech

The student matches examples of common vocabulary with their formal synonyms. Then, the same formal vocabulary is used in sentences where the student is supposed to find the mistakes and correct them. This is followed by an exercise in which questions are to be replaced with their formal equivalents.

Grammar 

In this part, the student learns how to make questions sound more polite (e.g. replacing can with could) and then puts their knowledge into practice by making question examples sound more polite and professional.

 In another grammar exercise, they need to find the mistakes in questions and correct them.

Make and do collocations

In a sorting exercise, the student decides whether words from the list collocate with the verb ‘make’ or ‘do,’ after which they complete the sentences with the correct forms of these two verbs.

Video

Before watching the video, the student completes a matching exercise to get familiar with the vocabulary which will be used in the video.  

After using new vocabulary to complete the sentences, the student watches the video How to sound professional and answers the questions related to it.