Summary
This downloadable PDF lesson plan for English teachers provides class material for teaching students how to complain politely. This practical ESL lesson helps students build confidence in difficult situations and develop key communication skills for daily life. This complete lesson plan guides students through the process of making a polite complaint. Activities include a warm-up discussion about personal experiences, a vocabulary matching exercise for describing problems, and a model dialogue analysis. Students then practice key grammar points before engaging in realistic role-play scenarios to build their speaking skills and confidence. This material is perfect for a practical, skills-based English class.
Activities
- Students begin by discussing their own experiences with complaining about products or services, activating their prior knowledge and personalizing the topic.
- A vocabulary matching exercise introduces key adjectives for describing common problems, such as 'faulty' electronics, 'under-cooked' food, and 'misleading' advertisements.
- Learners analyze a model dialogue set in a restaurant, identifying polite phrases and grammatical structures used to successfully resolve a problem with an order.
- The lesson culminates in a practical role-play activity where students work in pairs to handle three different complaint scenarios, such as a faulty product or a hotel room mix-up.
Vocabulary focus
The lesson focuses on practical vocabulary for describing common issues with products and services, including words like 'faulty', 'stained', 'under-cooked', 'over-charged', and 'misleading'. It also provides a toolkit of functional phrases for each stage of a complaint, from getting attention ("Excuse me...") to requesting a solution ("Could you possibly replace it?").
Grammar focus
The grammar section targets two key areas for making effective complaints. First, it reviews the use of the past simple to clearly and factually state what happened (e.g., "I ordered the chicken..."). Second, it focuses on using modals and conditional structures for making polite requests, such as "I was wondering if you could..." and "Would it be possible to...".
