Have you ever been in a meeting where you didn’t understand?
What do you think is the most important part of a meeting?
2. Reading Passage:
Meeting Conduct Guidelines
Time Management: All meetings must start and end on time. Agendas should be distributed 24 hours in advance.
Active Participation: All participants are expected to contribute meaningfully. Side conversations are discouraged.
Decision-Making: The meeting leader should ensure decisions are made through consensus or majority vote.
Role Assignment: A facilitator, timekeeper, and note-taker must be assigned at the beginning of each meeting.
Follow-Up: Minutes should be distributed within 48 hours, with clear action items assigned to relevant team members.
Choose the best answers for the following questions:
4. Discussion:
What is the difference between joining a meeting and leading one? How can you prepare for both?
How can the leader make sure everyone talks and shares ideas? What can they do if someone talks too much or too little?
How can you solve disagreements in a meeting? What can the leader do to help everyone talk calmly?
Why is it important to have a meeting plan? How does having a plan help the meeting?
What skills do you need to lead a meeting? How are these skills different from just joining the meeting?
5. Activities:
Students will role-play a business meeting about launching a new product. One student will be the meeting leader, and others will have different roles (note-taker, timekeeper, etc.). The leader will follow an agenda and make sure everyone speaks and contributes. After the role-play, students will share how they felt about their roles and the meeting.
6. Listening Extra
Listen to the following conversation and answer the questions.
transcription
“Hello everyone, welcome to today’s meeting. Before we start, I’d just like to go over some rules to ensure everything runs smoothly. First, you might want to mute your microphones when you’re not speaking to minimize background noise. I’d also suggest that you raise your hand virtually if you have any questions or comments during the discussion. This way, we can keep things orderly.
Now, moving on to today’s agenda. We’ll be discussing how we can improve team collaboration. One possible solution could be to implement more frequent check-ins. Perhaps we should consider having weekly briefings instead of monthly ones. Another idea might be to assign rotating leadership for each meeting to share responsibility.
Let me just pause here for a moment… Does that sound okay to everyone? You might want to think about these suggestions before we finalize anything.
To summarize, we’ve discussed a few key ideas—weekly briefings, rotating leadership, and better meeting organization. You may want to give these options some thought before we move forward. If there’s nothing else, we’ll wrap things up here. Thank you all for your input today, and I look forward to seeing how we can implement these suggestions.”
7. Language Focus
Use of Modals for Suggestions in Leading a Meeting
Introduction: In meetings, it’s common to use modal verbs such as might, could, should, and would to make suggestions in a polite and professional manner. These modals are useful during different parts of a meeting, including the opening, explaining rules, summarizing, and closing. Here’s how you can effectively use these modals when leading a meeting.
Opening a Meeting: During the opening, you can use modals to offer suggestions on how the meeting should proceed.
Example: “You might want to mute your microphones when you’re not speaking.”
Example: “We could start by reviewing the previous meeting’s minutes.”
Explaining the Rules: Modals are helpful when explaining how the meeting will be conducted. This allows for flexibility and politeness.
Example: “You should raise your hand if you have a question.”
Example: “We might want to follow the agenda strictly to stay on time.”
Summarizing the Meeting: When summarizing, modals help to softly propose actions or next steps.
Example: “We could implement weekly check-ins to improve communication.”
Example: “Perhaps we should consider rotating the meeting leadership.”
Closing the Meeting: When closing a meeting, modals can signal next steps without being too direct.
Example: “You might want to think about these ideas before the next meeting.”
Example: “We could follow up via email if there are no further comments.”
Practice: To reinforce the use of modals for making suggestions, try rewriting the following sentences using modals like might, could, should, or would to make them more polite and professional.
Answer the following questions
D. End Section (Writing): Write a meeting summary (minutes) based on the role-play.
