These materials below will help you to prepare for fluency building lessons on the topic: Starting A Business & Why Businesses Work.
How to use the materials:
Firstly, look at the topic questions - we will start the lesson by answering these. Then look at the materials that I have chosen to help you to start building your vocabulary and ideas around the topic and to answer the questions. Each material has been given an approximate difficulty level to understand which will suit you best.
The main focus of individual lessons is to use the materials as the basis of natural conversation about the topic to give you the opportunity to really develop your speaking skills, identify missing vocabulary, correct grammatical and pronunciation errors and actively teach you skills that will bring your English forwards.
When using the materials, write down any new vocabulary that you think you would need to talk about the topic - Any new vocabulary can be learnt most effectively using Anki flashcards. If you find a lot of new vocabulary, set a limit to how much you want to learn and only learn what you think is most relevant for yourself. Also, make a note of any questions that you have about the language or grammar used in the materials to discuss together.
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Starting A Business & Why Businesses Work
Questions
What do you think is necessary to start a successful business? What is the most important requirement?
If you needed to start a business, big or small, what kind of business would you start?
Materials
The world is full of stories of entrepreneurs who have turned a simple idea into a lucrative business - Jeff Bezos started Amazon from his garage, Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook from his dorm room and as you are reading this hundreds of thousands of people around the world are making enormous sums of money producing videos on YouTube. Have you ever considered starting a business yourself? whether yes or no, these materials look at the underlying concepts behind starting a successful business.
To get a basic idea, have a look at the article How to start a business: a beginner’s guide by an expert in strategy (B1 - B2). Forbes Advisor offer a much more detailed overview of the necessary steps to setting up a business in the article How to Start a Business in 11 Steps. (C1 - C2) Both articles contain essential vocabulary on this topic. To generate a couple of ideas, this article; 26 Best Small Business Ideas to Start in 2022 (B1 - B2) contains some excellent vocabulary related to each of the different ideas. This Ted talk below gives an interesting insight into the single biggest reason that start-ups succeed or not - what is it and why? (C1 - C2)
To give a bit of balance to the topic, this video from The Onion (a satirical news website) shows us a product idea that we possibly don't need anytime soon... (C1 - C2)
Over to you
Having thought about the topic questions to answer and looked through some of the materials you are ready to talk about this topic for some excellent speaking practice and to activate any new language you have learnt!
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