Free ESL Conversation Lesson Plan: Soft Drink Wars

When your conversation class has lost its fizz, this lesson will be a refreshing change. After running a conversation class for a long period of time, ESL students start to become bored with conversations about themselves and their family lives. It's your job as an ESL teacher to stop this boredom. This lesson will have them living out their marketing dreams and get them talking about something they all know.

Level:

ESL Intermediate or Business Intermediate speaking level or above

Vocabulary:

Brand Name, Demographics, Target Market, Advertise, Competitors, Slogan, Domestic, International, Market Research

Aims:

Encourage verbal fluency by discussing principles of marketing and products for different types of people. Increase student to student interaction.

Materials:

You will need slips of paper for each group with one of the following written on them: The Businessman's Drink, The Housewife's Drink, and The Student's Drink. Also, each member of the group will need a question worksheet for this activity (questions provided at the end of this article.)

Activity:

Arrange the students into groups of 5 or 6. If your ESL class is mixed ability, try to place the more advanced students into groups with those who are in lower levels. For the advanced students, this can test their ability to explain new concepts in English. For the lower level students, this can boost their confidence if the group is run effectively. Use of L1 should be restricted for this activity.

Each group should then receive one of target market slips and a worksheet for each student. This activity will be more interesting if some groups have the same target market. Once students receive their worksheet, you will want to check their understanding of the vocabulary involved in the lesson. The groups will have to work together to answer the questions on the worksheet. As they are doing this, you should circulate and have each group explain their answers and their process. Challenging their responses is essential to this activity.

When students reach the question about competition on their worksheet, have them choose a student to send to other groups to do some market research. Once they've completed this, you will want to sit with the individual groups and ask them how their product differs from others in the classroom.

Worksheet Questions:

What's your brand name? What are the demographics of your target market? What things are important to your target market? Why would your target market buy your soft drink? Why is your soft drink different than other soft drinks? Where would you advertise this soft drink? Who are your competitors? How is your product different than your competitors in the classroom? What is the slogan of your drink? Is your product for the international or domestic market?