Summary
This lesson plan helps C1-level ESL students master narrative tenses for telling compelling business success stories. This English class material uses an audio story about a startup, interactive exercises, and speaking prompts to improve storytelling skills in a professional context.
This lesson guides advanced students through the use of Past Simple, Past Continuous, Past Perfect, and Past Perfect Continuous. Activities include a listening gap-fill, a vocabulary matching task on business terms, and a reading exercise where students apply the grammar in context.
The material is designed to build fluency and precision when recounting sequences of events, providing background information, and describing the journey from challenge to success.
Activities
- A warm-up discussion about the meaning of a "business success story" and the challenges companies face.
- Listening comprehension based on an audio recording of a startup's journey, with a gap-fill exercise.
- An interactive vocabulary matching task to solidify understanding of key business terms like "disruptive," "trajectory," and "funding."
- A grammar focus section and multiple-choice quiz on the four narrative tenses (Past Simple, Continuous, Perfect, and Perfect Continuous).
- A reading and gap-fill exercise where students complete the story of a fictional company using the correct verb tenses.
- A structured speaking activity for students to practice telling their own business stories using the target language and grammar.
Vocabulary focus
The vocabulary section introduces essential terms for discussing business narratives. Key terms include "funding," "disruptive," "market positions," "trajectory," "relentless effort," and "persevered." Students learn to use this vocabulary to describe challenges, growth, innovation, and resilience in a corporate context.
Grammar focus
This lesson concentrates on the combined use of narrative tenses: Past Simple, Past Continuous, Past Perfect, and Past Perfect Continuous. The grammar practice is designed to help students understand how to structure a story by distinguishing between main events, background actions, and events that occurred at an earlier point in the past, creating a clear and engaging narrative.
