Idioms: easy and difficult

This lesson focuses on understanding, recognising, and confidently using common English idioms related to ease, difficulty, challenge, and effort. Learners explore how to describe tasks that are simple, demanding, frustrating, or overwhelming, using idiomatic expressions that are highly frequent in everyday spoken and written English.

Activities Overview

Students read a realistic dialogue about a group project and identify idioms such as a walk in the park, smooth sailing, an uphill battle, like pulling teeth, no joke, a tall order, and easier said than done. Learners match each idiom to its definition, strengthening comprehension through contextualised exposure. Next, students complete sentences using the correct idioms from Activity 1. This reinforces meaning, usage, and collocation while ensuring each expression is used accurately and only once. Learners then answer speaking questions about their own experiences with difficult tasks, workplace challenges, and personal goals. This communicative stage promotes fluency and encourages natural use of idiomatic language.

After that, students explore a second set of expressions, including a piece of cake, child’s play, a rocky road, have your work cut out for you, give someone a run for their money, could do it in my sleep, and it’s not rocket science. Short dialogues help learners understand tone, nuance, and register. Learners match idioms to definitions, focusing on subtle differences between expressions describing effort, skill, competition, and sarcasm. Students complete realistic scenarios using the most appropriate idiom. This task develops accuracy and prepares learners for real-life communication. Discussion prompts encourage students to talk about work, studies, competitions, and life challenges using target idioms naturally in extended answers.

Finally, learners write original sentences about everyday tasks (e.g. exercising regularly, assembling IKEA furniture, negotiating a salary, running a marathon), deciding whether each task is a tall order, a walk in the park, an uphill battle, or smooth sailing for them.

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