Instructor's Notes

Part B: First lesson after the negotiations began

Thinking About the Topic

This is a warm-up exercise that prepares the students to relate personal experience to the information that they will find in this module. The language learning objective is to write about a decision that was most important to them and then to discuss it in small groups. The students are also requested to make an ad hoc analysis of the decision making process and the outcomes.

Vocabulary

This list of words gives some of the key vocabulary items that the students will find in different contexts in this module. It is important that the students decide for themselves how well they know these words, then discuss the meaning of the words with other classmates and finally with the teacher.

This exercise should be done again at the end of the module, so that the students may see how their vocabulary has improved. It is understood that in most cases, they will move the checkmarks to the right.

Negotiation Journal

At this point the students are carrying on their negotiations as a homework assignment. It is important, however, to allocate classroom time (15-20 minutes of each class) to put the students in groups of three or four and ask them to read their Negotiation Journal entries and to discuss the offers and counter-offers, opinions about partners, negotiation strategies, predictions of outcomes, etc. This activity creates an opportunity for the students to use vocabulary related to negotiations that they are constantly exposed to while negotiating.

Language of emails

Should you decide that the students may benefit from analyzing the language of email messages, you could do the following:

Make one copy for each student of all email messages in the Writing Models section

Ask the students to highlight phrases that are: opening statements, closing statements, expressions of disagreement and attempts to persuade, using different colour for each category.

Then the students could make a table with the headings above and enter appropriate phrases under appropriate headings. This should help them to write their own email messages.

Example:

Opening statement Closing statement Disagreement Persuasion