Explaining Outages & Delays

B1 · Intermediate1 hr 6 minIT & TechnologyLesson 7 of 8 · Outline

Aims

Goal: deliver outage news so clearly and calmly that people stop panicking — status, impact, action and next update, even when you have no ETA.

The lesson, stage by stage

  1. Warm up5 min

    Warm-up: Everything is down. Say something.

    2 warm-up questions

  1. Reading10 min

    Reading: Communicating About Outages

    Read a 202-word text about Communicating About Outages

  2. Vocabulary8 min

    Vocabulary: Outage & Status Vocabulary

    7 items

  3. Framework6 min

    Framework: Status Update Template

    Status Update Template, 4 steps

  4. Reading10 min

    Reading: One outage, three model updates

    Read a 273-word text about One outage, three model updates

  5. Practice7 min

    Practice: Fix the Status Updates

    Error-correction exercise, 5 items

  6. Dialogue10 min

    Dialogue: Explaining an Outage to a Manager

    Role-play: A department manager calls because their team can't access the CRM system. You know the infrastructure team is working on it, but there's no ETA yet. (8 lines)

  7. Discussion10 min

    Discussion: Your mission: run the updates

    3 discussion questions

Open the full lesson

The remaining 7 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.

outagedowntimeETAstatus pagemaintenance windowimpactrestore

This plan comes from the Tech Support & Troubleshooting course in the Tuton library. Browse all free lesson plans.