Throughout the lesson, learners use the target phrases to talk about real experiences – bad days, surprising outcomes, complex situations, and personal opinions. Activities like the Speaking Challenge, sentence upgrades, and discussion questions give students multiple opportunities to internalize and produce the language without feeling overwhelmed.
By the end of the lesson, students will be able to use idiomatic infinitive phrases accurately and naturally to add nuance, emphasis, and sophistication to their speech and writing. It’s an excellent resource for B2–C1 learners looking to sound more fluent and native-like in everyday communication.
lesson overview
This B2–C1 ESL lesson on idiomatic infinitives helps upper-intermediate and advanced students take their English to the next level by mastering a set of high-frequency fixed phrases used to frame opinions, add emphasis, clarify meaning, and structure discourse. Through a rich variety of activities and extensive speaking practice, learners develop the ability to use these expressions naturally and confidently in conversation and writing. Students begin by reflecting on their own communication style before diving into key idiomatic infinitives such as to put it bluntly, to say the least, to make matters worse, to top it all off, not to mention, to name but a few, and many more. They explore the meaning and function of each phrase, categorize them by communicative purpose, and gradually move toward producing them independently in context. The user-friendly digital format allows easy navigation in presentation mode with just a click of the spacebar, requiring no additional software.
Target Audience:
- Level: B2–C1 (Upper-Intermediate to Advanced)
- Best for: Adults and older teens
Content Breakdown:
- Warm-Up: self-reflection on communication style
- Matching Activity
- Categorizing Phrases by communicative function
- Fill-in-the-Blank tasks using target phrases in context
- Multiple-Choice Activity to select the most appropriate phrase per sentence
- Sentence Upgrade task
- Speaking Challenge with 10 personalized prompts
- Open Discussion Questions encouraging extended use of target language
- Sentence Completion activity for creative, personalized production
HOMEWORK (Extra Language Immersion):
Watch & Reflect
For homework, students watch a short video and complete sentences based on what they see, using idiomatic infinitives from the lesson. They reconstruct events and reactions through the target language, applying phrases like to say the least, to make matters worse, and to cut a long story short in a natural, narrative context.