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Business ESL: Relaying the News
by Chris Gunn
Materials:
Activity Sheet: Reporting the Company News
Vocabulary Sheet: The Good News and the Bad News
Vocabulary Sheet: Expectations and Stock Prices
Purpose and Audience:
The purpose of these materials is to get the students to practice relaying information about a company to coworkers. There are three main language points:
(1) Reported Speech:
He said that . . .
She told me that . . .
(2) Comparing outcomes with expectations or plans:
is ahead of schedule.
is behind schedule
is higher than expected
is lower than forecast
is greater than anticipated
(3) Using noun clauses to report the news:
The good news is that + noun clause
The bad news is that + noun clause
Vocabulary Warm-up:
As a warm-up, the teacher can go over the vocabulary sheets listed above or have the students do them for homework before class. One activity I do on the board and then orally is as follows: I write a few sentence about what I thought on the board. For example,
I thought profits would be about 15 million dollars.
I thought fuel costs would be about 1.4 million dollars.
In reality, profits were 8 million dollars.
In reality, fuel costs were 2.2 million dollars.
Then ask the students to compare reality with my expectations. I usually do the first few for them so that they can see where I'm heading with it.
Profits were lower than expected.
Fuel costs were higher than anticipated.
After we've done a few on the board, I try to do some orally to give them some practice listening to big numbers. I also do the same routine with ahead of schedule and behind schedule.
Class Activity:
Each student is given a corporate role card that contains some good news and some bad news that the boss has given the student. (The boss has just returned from an overseas trip). The student will have to relay this news to other coworkers. In turn the coworkers will relay news about other overseas factories. Everybody will take notes and fill out the table on the activity sheet.
All materials (c) 2007 Lanternfish ESL