This downloadable PDF lesson plan for English teachers helps B2 students master business writing. This ESL class material focuses on crafting concise executive summaries and briefs, a key skill for professional communication and clear, effective reporting.
This comprehensive English lesson guides students through the process of writing effective summaries. Activities include a warm-up discussion, a gap-fill listening exercise, vocabulary matching, and a detailed analysis of a sample text. Students then practice key grammar points like nominalization and the passive voice before applying all their skills in a final writing task where they draft their own professional brief. The lesson is designed to be practical and engaging for business English learners, providing useful phrases for structuring reports.
Activities
- Students start with a gap-fill listening exercise to grasp the key concepts of writing effective summaries, tuning their ears to business-specific language and ideas about brevity and clarity.
- The lesson features a reading and analysis task where learners compare a news article to its executive summary, answering comprehension questions to understand how key information is distilled.
- Learners practice transforming sentences using nominalization and the passive voice, key grammatical structures for achieving a formal, objective, and concise tone in business writing.
- The final activity challenges students to apply all the learned skills by writing their own concise executive brief based on the provided article, using target vocabulary and grammar.
Vocabulary focus
The vocabulary section introduces essential terms for professional reporting and summarizing. Students will learn and practice words such as salient, concise, actionable, stakeholders, brevity, comprehensive, distill, and digestible, ensuring they can communicate with clarity and precision in a business context.
Grammar focus
The grammar practice centers on two key structures for formal writing: nominalization (changing verbs/adjectives to nouns) and the passive voice. The exercises help students make their writing more abstract, objective, and dense, which is characteristic of executive summaries and professional reports.
