Small Talk Basics

A2 · Elementary57 minBasic BasicsLesson 2 of 8 · Outline

Aims

Goal: make two minutes of friendly small talk — weather, weekend, and a “by the way” topic change.

The lesson, stage by stage

  1. Warm up5 min

    Warm-up: Two friendly minutes

    2 warm-up questions

  1. Reading10 min

    Reading: Making Conversation

    Read a 133-word text about Making Conversation

  2. Vocabulary8 min

    Vocabulary: Small Talk Words

    6 items

  3. Practice7 min

    Practice: Small Talk Phrases

    Gap-fill exercise, 6 items

  4. Practice7 min

    Practice: Build Small Talk Sentences

    Word-ordering exercise, 5 items

  5. Dialogue10 min

    Dialogue: Making Small Talk

    Role-play: You meet a colleague at the coffee machine at work (6 lines)

  6. Discussion10 min

    Discussion: Your mission: keep it going

    3 discussion questions

Open the full lesson

The remaining 6 stages of this lesson, with the procedure, the examples and the exercises, are included with Starter, along with the interactive version you can teach from. Lesson 1 of this course is free: the full plan is on this site, and a free account opens it in the interactive player.

Target vocabulary

In a Tuton account these words become your student's vocabulary deck, so they come back in practice between lessons.

weatherlovelyactuallyneighbourby the waycatch up

This plan comes from the Building Confidence course in the Tuton library. Browse all free lesson plans.