Phrasal nouns: business

This ESL worksheet helps learners master common business phrasal nouns through realistic dialogues and communicative tasks. Students learn to recognise, correct, and use high-frequency phrasal nouns such as breakdown, setback, workaround, outlook, and takeaway in professional and everyday contexts. Ideal for B2-level Business English learners.

Activities Overview:

Activity 1: Phrasal Noun Definitions & Matching
Students are introduced to key phrasal nouns with clear, learner-friendly definitions. They read a short workplace dialogue and match each phrasal noun to its correct meaning.

Activity 2: Gap-Fill Text (Business Context)
Learners complete a realistic business case study by choosing the correct phrasal nouns from a list. The text focuses on projects, logistics, delays, and planning, helping students practise collocations and understand how phrasal nouns function.

Activity 3: Discussion Questions Using Phrasal Nouns
Students answer open-ended questions related to work, study, science, and business. They are encouraged to actively use target phrasal nouns (e.g. holdup, setback, backup, breakthrough) in meaningful communication, promoting fluency and critical thinking.

Activity 4: Dialogue Analysis & Meaning Matching
Short dialogues illustrate phrasal nouns such as breakdown, takeover, turnover, layoffs, and layout. Students match each noun to its definition.

Activity 5: Synonym Replacement
To practise, learners replace highlighted words or phrases with suitable phrasal nouns from the lesson.

Activity 6: Conversation questions
Students discuss a few questions given to activate the target vocabulary.

Activity 7: Error correction
Students identify and correct incorrectly used phrasal nouns in a short narrative. This activity sharpens accuracy and strengthens understanding of meaning distinctions between similar phrasal nouns.

Activity 8: Outlook Statements
Students write a few sentences predicting the future (outlook) of topics such as remote work, artificial intelligence, or space travel. They must include at least one additional phrasal noun.

For more speaking practice, you can use the printable conversation cards.