Master the language of consumer psychology by decoding the persuasion techniques behind impulse buying, analysing manipulative adverts and writing your own campaign in English.
Main objectives of this material
- Develop natural vocabulary related to workplace gossip and investigation, including expressions such as the rumour mill, jump to conclusions, put two and two together, get to the bottom of something, a dead giveaway and keep something under wraps.
- Strengthen speaking and reasoning skills by analysing clues about a colleague who has vanished from the office, reading her co-workers' theories in a kitchen dialogue, and questioning a partner to reconstruct three escalating office mysteries.
- Learn and practise past modals of deduction using structures such as she must have left in a hurry, he might have received an urgent call and she can't have planned to leave to express certainty, possibility and impossibility about past events.
What students are going to cover
In this lesson, students will explore the question of what must have happened to a colleague who left the office without a word, through a set of clues and a short dialogue between her co-workers. They will build vocabulary related to workplace gossip, evidence and investigation, and strengthen their speaking skills by proposing theories before the grammar is explained, so that the past modals of deduction emerge from context rather than from a rule. Students then sort the modals onto a certainty ladder, practise them in two office-based exercises, and use them in a Build the Mystery information-gap game where one partner holds the event and the other reconstructs it from clues. By the end of the lesson, learners will be able to make confident deductions with must have, suggest possibilities with might have, rule out explanations with can't have, and discuss office rumours in natural English.
🔒 Part of Complete · B1 · B2
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