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This is a speaking lesson plan designed for teenagers that focuses on various exponents of suggesting, offering, agreeing and disagreeing. The main aim of the lesson is for students to improve their collaborative speaking skills, it will work well as preparation for FCE/CAE speaking exams. You will need the powerpoint and teacher’s notes below:
Get Organised!! – Powerpoint
Teacher’s notes
The class is loosely based on Willis’s Task Based Learning in that students are given the opportunity to repeatedly practice a similar task and hopefully internalise some useful exponents for collaborative speaking.
Put students into groups of 3, it would also work with pairs but 3s are ideal. The idea is that groups perform the tasks separately and afterwards compare their decisions in a mini-presentation.
Show the 2nd slide of the power point. Clear up any doubts about the different exponents on the left.Then have students perform the task in their groups, encourage them to use a range of expressions and to be imaginative. Monitor and board any vocabulary they need, or any issues they have with the form or pronunciation of the exponents. Groups then feed back in open class.
Note: This is a good opportunity to teach the difference between “will” for decisions in the moment of speaking and “be going to” for a future intention. Students will discuss the different options using will:
“We’ll have the party on Friday so we can stay up late.”
“Yeah, that’s a good idea.”
Then when the time comes to present their decisions to class they will change to “be going to.”
“We’re going to have the party on Friday so we can stay up late.”
Then students go back to their groups and repeat with the next task but trying to bear any corrections you boarded during the first task in mind. Again groups feed back in open class and compare and contrast their ideas.
For the remainder of the tasks on the powerpoint the exponents are hidden initially but can be shown with a click of the mouse or the right arrow key. They idea is that you gradually phase out having the exponents on the board in the hope that they continue to use them from memory.
Follow up
Students could write an FCE/CAE style report on one of the events they have organised. It could either be a report after the fact stating the strengths and weaknesses of the event or a proposal for a future event putting forward different ideas and making recommendations.