B1 General Lesson Flow

What is a Lesson Flow?

Lesson Flow is a sequence of lessons, designed to take your student on a particular learning journey. A flow contains 15-20 lessons covering the four skills as well as vocabulary, grammar and functional language. The additional follow-up lesson suggestions offer extra opportunities for reading and speaking practice, as well as targeted grammar exercises related to the topic. Lesson Flows are compilations of pre-existing ESL Brains lessons, but with a new purpose of helping teachers navigate learning in a more structured way. They serve as guidelines that you can and should customize by adding or removing lessons based on your students’ needs.

What’s inside the B1 General Lesson Flow?

This flow helps students become intermediate users of English. It will boost their confidence with the help of authentic listening material, as well as varied speaking tasks. Students will also improve their grammar and vocabulary as well as practise using new material in speaking.

Last updated (June 2025)

Since we first published the flow, we have added lessons on Past Perfect and passive voice, as well as an additional one on functional language. We’ve also provided more follow-up lesson ideas.

Developing language skills

With this B1 General Lesson Flow, your students will work on:

• speaking skills: while talking about themselves and about what life used to be like; while discussing modern cities, travelling by plane, social media, texting, websites and website creation, important objects, food waste and fast fashion; when speculating about the future; when explaining when it’s appropriate to apologize and why; when making comparisons; while talking about being productive and unproductive; 
• listening skills while watching (among others): two videos about entrepreneurs, videos with tips on work-life balance, packing and minimalist wardrobe, a video about schools in the past, an ad for smart city solutions and one for cloud services, videos about learning new information, a presentation of robots that do chores, a report about flying business class, a vlog about texting, a presentation about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs; while listening to a recording in which speakers express opinions;
• reading skills while reading: an article about robot chefs and one about reading books, a text about a famous entrepreneur, a survey and descriptions of online courses;
• writing skills: when writing a short bio, describing photos, creating a quiz and writing stories.

Improving grammar, vocabulary and functional language

The Flow also makes your students learn and practise:

• vocabulary related to: companies and their milestones, learning and remembering, phrases for speculation, travelling by plane, social media, fashion, important objects.
• grammar: past forms (Past Simple, ‘used to’, Past Perfect), future forms (Future Simple Present Continuous and ‘going to’), making comparisons, conjunctions and prepositions, the use of gerund, passive voice, First and Second Conditional.
• functional language: expressing possibility, doubt and certainty, making and accepting apologies, making excuses.

Want to learn more?

If you’re not sure how to use our Lesson Flows or need more guidance, you can read more about them here or message us via chat or the contact form. Let us help you save some prep time and make your teaching life easier!