| LESSON OVERVIEW
The business world is multinational. This means that your students work (or will work) with people of different cultural backgrounds on a daily basis. Therefore, it may be the reason your students actually want to learn Business English. While this cultural complexity enriches us, such a melting pot may be a challenge and impact how we work. That’s why cross-cultural communication is such an important topic.
The topic of this ESL lesson focuses on working in a global, multinational team and its various aspects. The cornerstone of this worksheet is a video by Erin Meyer, the author of The Culture Map, who is an expert in strategies of improving the effectiveness of global projects, in which she talks how people from different cultures see each other and communicate.
The worksheet consists of many various activities developing vocabulary (e.g. business idioms) and speaking skills. As usual, it also includes a video and a listening comprehension task. In addition, it involves a lot of discussion about cultural differences and doing business with people from various cultural backgrounds. Moreover, students will have an opportunity to work on some business fixed phrases and discuss dilemmas connected with workplaces and bosses. Before watching the video, they can learn more about Erin Meyer’s book and the idea of the culture map. Then, while listening, students need to get some information how different cultures perceive each other.
EXTRA WORKSHEET – BUSINESS IDIOMS
Finally, check our extra worksheet on business idioms. It includes such tasks as filling in the gaps, matching definitions and group discussion. The extra worksheet can be done as part of the lesson – at the beginning or at the end of it.
WORKSHEETS
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Love this one, very focused, good audio, great interesting discussion topics.
Thanks for feedback!
Great job!! Thank you so much 🙂
Thank you!
Great work, have used this in several classes so far.
Thanks 🙂
I currently teach English in a Multinational company and that lesson seems just perfect !!!
Nice to hear it! Thanks
Thanks Wendy! Stan, sorry I didn’t get back sooner – haven’t been on the site for a while – LOVE the activities throughout.
Just great, thanks a lot for this
Thanks!
Hi Justa, thanks a lot for this lesson plan. It’s one of the best ones on this website!
Thank you! I’m happy to hear that!
Excellent lesson! I am teaching a few students who work for multi-national companies in Russia. They thoroughly enjoyed the lesson and got great value out of it. Thank you!
Awesome! We’re really happy to hear that 🙂
I love when lessons are designed as Problem-Based-learning which stimulates critical and reflective thinking. This lesson is just right!
Thanks for your comment! We really appreciate that!
Hi, how can I get the video. No permission
We had to update the video we use and change the lesson a bit. It’s back online now 🙂
Hello, I can’t open this lesson for some reason. It says “500 Internal Server Error”
Hi there! We’re sorry for inconvenience, but we had a brief server problem, but now all the worksheets should work fine. Check it out!
I really like this worksheet, there is always great discussion generated from it.
However in exercise 2 it often confuses my students when it says “popular business phrases” , are they not more like collocations ?
Hi! I’m happy that you find the worksheet so engaging 🙂 If your students find this topic interesting, you can also check out our other lesson with the same speaker here. Regarding ex.2, yes, we could say that some of the phrases are collocations. We used ‘popular business expressions’ in the instruction to make students aware that the chosen language is commonly used in the business context.
I haven’t found EXTRA WORKSHEET – BUSINESS IDIOMS
Hi! There is a temporary glitch and the link in the lesson post doesn’t appear correctly. I’m pasting the link to the extra worksheet here. Hope that helps!
This video isn’t available anymore!!!!
This video isn’t available anymore!!!! These two can help
https://youtube.com/shorts/mQtiVm4q7-w?si=6fukekZ5YZuiYR5w
https://youtube.com/shorts/S7vYJWWFPzc?si=GRRVP8Gy4e1qfLuF
Thanks for sharing, Christiane! The two videos you linked provide answers to questions b)-d) in the listening task, and this one is for question a): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQvqDv4vbEg (to 02:37).