Summary
This downloadable PDF lesson for B2 ESL students focuses on expressing degrees of certainty and probability in a business context. This English class material uses a variety of exercises, including listening, reading, and speaking, to teach students how to communicate confidence levels effectively during business decisions.
This lesson helps intermediate students master essential phrases for professional communication. Activities include a warm-up discussion, a listening gap-fill, a vocabulary matching task, and a reading comprehension exercise based on a business scenario. Students will practice using adverbs and phrases like "highly probable," "slight chance," and "absolutely certain" through grammar exercises and sentence transformations. The lesson culminates in speaking practice, where students apply the target language to realistic business scenarios, enhancing their ability to navigate discussions involving risk and uncertainty.
Activities
- A warm-up discussion to explore how students approach decision-making when outcomes are uncertain.
- A listening comprehension exercise where students complete a monologue with phrases expressing different levels of certainty.
- A key vocabulary matching task to solidify the meanings of terms like "highly probable" and "fairly confident."
- A grammar focus section and multiple-choice quiz on using adverbs and phrases to convey certainty and probability.
- A reading comprehension activity based on a fictional company's board meeting, followed by a gap-fill task.
- A sentence transformation exercise to practice rewriting informal statements with more formal business language.
- Guided speaking practice using business scenarios to encourage students to discuss predictions and possibilities with the target language.
Vocabulary focus
The vocabulary section introduces key phrases for articulating different levels of confidence. Core terms include "highly probable," "slight chance," "absolutely certain," "unlikely," "fairly confident," and "strong possibility." Students learn to use this language to sound more precise and professional when discussing forecasts, risks, and business strategies.
Grammar focus
This lesson concentrates on a range of adverbs and phrases used to express degrees of certainty and probability. The grammar is presented in a structured way, categorizing language from high certainty (e.g., "absolutely certain," "without a doubt") and high probability (e.g., "highly probable," "very likely") down to low probability (e.g., "unlikely," "slight chance"), giving students a clear framework for modulating their language.
