Idioms: nominations and awards

This ESL lesson introduces students to idioms related to awards, nominations, and competition. It is an ideal class to teach before or after the Oscars 2025 as it contains a dialogue about the 2025 Oscar nominations. Through vocabulary exercises, sentence correction, dialogue completion, and engaging discussions, students will practice using idioms naturally in conversations about the Oscars, Grammys, Emmys, sports competitions, and other major awards.

The lesson begins with a vocabulary-matching activity, where students read sentences featuring key idioms and match them to their correct definitions. Expressions include in the running, scoop the pool, make history, bag an award, dark horse, and get a nod.

Next, students complete a sentence-matching exercise, where they pair two halves of a sentence to correctly use the idioms in context.

To reinforce learning, students engage in a dialogue completion task, inserting idioms in the correct form while reading realistic conversations about award nominations, wins, and industry trends. Afterward, they match idioms from the dialogues to their meanings to ensure full comprehension.

In the error correction task, students identify and fix mistakes in sentences where idioms have been misused, helping them fine-tune their accuracy.

A multiple-choice dialogue activity follows, where students select the most appropriate idiom to complete a scripted conversation about past and upcoming Oscars.

The lesson then moves into real-world application, where students choose a recent or upcoming award ceremony—such as the Oscars, Grammys, Emmy Awards, or a major sports competition—and use the idioms to discuss past results or predict winners. To support their discussions, they are provided with useful expressions for making comparisons, expressing certainty or doubt, and analyzing potential winners.

Finally, students participate in a discussion activity, where they reflect on the impact of awards, debate the fairness of nominations, and consider whether certain artists, athletes, or films deserved their recognition.

For additional speaking practice, printable conversation cards are included.