Idioms: reviews

This lesson focuses on understanding, recognising, and confidently using common English idioms for describing reviews, opinions, recommendations, and personal experiences. Learners explore how to express positive and negative reactions to products, services, restaurants, films, travel experiences, and customer service situations using natural idiomatic expressions that are highly frequent in everyday spoken and written English.

Activities Overview

Students begin by reading realistic reviews about a restaurant, a rental car company, and a budget product. They identify and understand idioms such as out of this world, do the job, you get what you pay for, a bumpy ride, leave a bad taste in my mouth, nothing to write home about, and leave a lot to be desired. Learners match each expression to its definition, building comprehension through contextualised examples and developing awareness of how idioms are used in real-life reviews.

Next, students complete sentences using the correct idioms from the first activity. This reinforces meaning, grammar, and collocation while helping learners choose the most appropriate expression for different situations. Speaking activities then encourage students to discuss restaurants, products, transport problems, customer service experiences, and positive surprises while naturally incorporating the target idioms into their answers.

Students are introduced to a second group of expressions connected to quality, value, and recommendations, including worth every penny, getting my money’s worth, second to none, missed the mark, a breath of fresh air, you can’t go wrong with, and didn’t live up to the hype. Through short dialogues and matching tasks, learners explore differences in meaning, tone, and usage. They practise identifying whether an idiom describes excellent quality, disappointment, good value, reliability, or something refreshing and new.

Learners then complete multiple-choice activities and recommendation tasks, choosing the most suitable idiom for different contexts. These exercises develop accuracy and prepare students to use idiomatic language when giving opinions, making suggestions, and discussing purchases or experiences. Role-play activities provide further speaking practice, with students recommending products, questioning expensive purchases, and describing negative service experiences using the target expressions.

Finally, students correct mistakes in 8 sentences to further reinforce accuracy.

For additional speaking practice, you can use the printable conversation cards to encourage extended discussions and help learners apply these expressions in spontaneous conversations.