Negotiation strategies
Lesson plan overview
With this ESL lesson plan, students will learn essential vocabulary and functional language for negotiating in various everyday and business situations. They will practice key negotiation expressions, explore strategies for successful bargaining, and build confidence in discussing offers, counteroffers, and agreements. This lesson is most suitable for B2-level learners, and is ideal for students aiming to improve their negotiation skills in English for both professional and personal contexts. Other lessons you might like are “High-stakes negotiations“, “The power of persuasion“, “Phrasal verbs: negotiations“, “Phrasal verbs: convincing and persuading“, “Soft skills vs hard skills“, and“Idioms: compromising“.
Speaking: The lesson begins with discussion questions about common negotiation scenarios, personal experiences with negotiating, and qualities of good negotiators, encouraging students to share opinions and build fluency. Then they discuss a few statements about negotiating.
Vocabulary: Students study the stages of negotiation—preparation, exchanging information, bargaining, and closing the deal—matching sentences to each stage and practicing relevant verbs and phrases. This builds a strong vocabulary foundation for effective negotiation. Then they extract collocations from the sentences they read (e.g. reject an offer, back out of a deal, draw up a contract, reach a compromise). They practice with a multiple-choice activity, and then they discuss a few conversation questions.
Listening: Students watch a video called “Five basic negotiating strategies”, identifying how each strategy balances outcome and relationship importance, and answer comprehension questions. They then discuss which strategies they have used or might use in different situations.
Functional language: Students learn useful negotiation expressions for starting conversations, making offers, bargaining, agreeing, politely disagreeing, asking for clarification, closing deals, and walking away. They analyze dialogues to see these phrases in real-life contexts.
Practice: The lesson includes role-plays simulating salary negotiations, car buying, renting apartments, business partnerships, freelance contracts, and international trade. These activities encourage students to apply negotiation language and strategies in realistic contexts.
Conversation cards are available for additional speaking practice to enhance fluency and confidence.
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Teacher’s lesson plan
Student’s worksheet
Student’s interactive PDF
Conversation cards PDF
Pre-class activities
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In-class activities
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Additional resources
Each video-based lesson plan includes links to additional resources (videos and articles), which are FREE can be found online (in the pre-class activities page. These links aim to extend the learning experience, enabling students to connect classroom knowledge with real-world applications.
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Teacher’s lesson plan
Student’s worksheet
Student’s interactive PDF
Conversation cards PDF
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