From sales people, to the marketing department, to IT; we all have to schedule meetings in the work place. Help your students organise meetings and events in English with these essential phases.
Practising the target language
In order to teach vocabulary it’s very important to practice the target language.
This could be by:
- Asking your student to speak about their work life, using as many of these phrases as possible.
- Asking your student to give you example sentences of each vocabulary term.
- Doing a role play: The tutor is the student’s work colleague and the student must set up a meeting or event by choosing a suitable date and location. Try to use as many of these phrases as possible.
PDF vocabulary set to give your students
After studying the topic, here is a PDF to give to your students of the complete vocabulary set.
Organising a date in your calendar
To arrange a date.
‘Everything is arranged, we can’t go back now.’
To fix a time or date in a calendar.
‘OK, so let’s fix a time for your next appointment. How about next Tuesday?’
To schedule a time or date.
‘The train is scheduled to leave at 8pm.’
Phrases to say that a meeting is or is not convenient
To suit /soot/– be convenient or acceptable to you.
‘The mornings don’t suit me because I have to work’
To be suitable/ to be convenient (adjectives).
‘We need to fix a suitable time for the event to take place.’
To work – to be acceptable/ convenient.
‘This date doesn’t work for me because I have a meeting.’
To be good.
‘December is not good for me because it’s the end of the year and I have a lot of work to do. What about January?’
When you have problems organising something
‘To work out’ – to solve a problem.
‘We’ll work out the date another day.’
To sort out something – to organise/to fix.
‘We’ll sort this out when we meet face-to-face.’
Meeting someone
To meet someone (no ‘with’).
‘I am going to meet my neighbour for a drink this Saturday.’
To meet up with someone.
‘I met up with my sister last week.’
To bump into someone – to see/meet someone unexpectedly or by coincidence
‘I bumped into my old teacher last week.’
The perfect listening homework for this topic
BBC 6 Minute English: What’s on your to-do list?
Final thoughts
What scheduling vocabulary have we missed? Put them in the comments below and we’ll add them to the list.
Happy teaching!
Andromeda
Andromeda is a Fluentify English tutor. She has been teaching English in Spain and online since 2012. In addition to teaching, she is a TEFL writer. She recently moved to Edinburgh, Scotland and is currently working on her Scottish accent.