Summary
This downloadable PDF lesson plan for English teachers helps C2 students critically analyse corporate responsibility and greenwashing. A perfect ESL class material for advanced business English, focusing on sophisticated language and critical thinking.
This comprehensive lesson guides advanced students through the complex world of corporate communication. Activities include a warm-up discussion on ethics, a vocabulary matching task with corporate jargon, a challenging listening gap-fill, and a practical exercise analysing a sustainability report. The lesson culminates in a structured debate on corporate ethics, encouraging students to use the target language to form sophisticated arguments. It’s ideal for developing critical thinking and advanced language skills.
Activities
- Warm-up and discussion: Students begin by spotting common errors in a series of sentences. This leads into a group discussion about why these particular grammar mistakes are so frequent for English language learners, activating their prior knowledge.
- Vocabulary matching: Students master key business terms like 'greenwashing' and 'stakeholder value' through a matching exercise before applying them in a challenging listening gap-fill where they deconstruct authentic-sounding corporate-speak.
- Listening comprehension: Learners dive deep into the language of evasion, learning to identify nominalization and use hedging language. They then apply these analytical skills to a case study, dissecting a fictional sustainability report for vague claims.
- Speaking debate: Students engage in sophisticated discussions and a final group debate. They argue provocative statements about corporate responsibility, building fluency and confidence in expressing nuanced opinions on complex ethical topics.
Vocabulary focus
This lesson targets sophisticated C2-level vocabulary essential for understanding corporate and media discourse. Key terms include 'greenwashing', 'stakeholder value', 'ostensibly', 'perfunctory', 'substantive', and 'disingenuous'. The focus is on words used to critically evaluate claims and understand the nuances of corporate communication.
Grammar focus
The grammar section explores the subtle language of corporate communication. It focuses on nominalization (e.g., 'implementation' vs. 'we will implement'), showing how it can create an impersonal and evasive tone. It also teaches the use of hedging language ('appears to be', 'it could be argued') for expressing critical analysis and skepticism.
