Being polite in English is all about “softening” the language and this fun hour-long lesson teaches students how to do just that.

Materials to prepare before class:

• Stack of post-it notes
• “Polite Requests Scenarios Worksheet” printed and cut up (enough for every student in your class to have at least one scenario (see below)
• “Being Polite Chart” printed out or ready to project onto the board (see below)

Step 1: Post-it notes (10 minutes)

Before class, write this on a post-it note, “Lend me a pen.” When you arrive in class, greet your students as normal, then pass one of them the note. After the student has given you their pen, ask the student to read your note out loud. 

Tell the students that they want their friend to do something for them. They are going to get some sticky notes and must write their requests on the notes.

Put these three examples on the board. 

• “Lend me a pen.”
• “Let’s go to the movies later.”
• “Can I have a cookie?”

Tell students that their requests can be for anything. Then pass out the sticky notes. Each student should have at least three sticky notes. Give students time to write their requests. The teacher should write three requests on sticky notes too.

Once everyone has at least three requests written, collect the post-its.

Step 2: Categorize (10 minutes)

Now write the words “informal” and “polite” on the board. Shuffle the post-it notes and take 3 randomly from the pile. Read those three requests out loud to the students and ask them to tell you which category they go into. If it’s a very polite or more formal request, put it on one side, and if it’s more friendly or informal, then put it on the other side.

Now put students into partners. Walk around the room and distribute six post-its to each pair of students. Distribute the post-its randomly. Then ask students to decide if their post-its are polite or informal. When students know where each of their post-its should go, they can come up and stick them on the board before sitting back down.

After all of the post-its are on the board, go through them out loud with your students and make sure they’ve categorized them correctly.

Step 3: Softening requests (10 minutes)

Next, tell students that today you’ll be learning how to soften requests and make them more polite. Of course, it’s okay to tell your best friend, “Give me that,” but for a classmate you don’t know very well, it’s not polite. Ask students how else they could make that request.

After your students have given their ideas, show them this chart.

If you prefer, you can download a PDF of the chart and pass it out to your students. The PDF is below.

Read through the chart together and check if your students have any questions or pronunciation difficulties.

Step 4: Informal to polite (15 minutes)

Put students back into partners. Take all the informal post-its off the board, and pass them out to the students. If there aren’t enough informal post-its, you can take some “polite” post-its and give them to your students.

Now ask students to make these requests more polite. Give them time to write the more polite request on the back of the post-its. Then have one set of partners go talk to another set of partners. They can share the original informal request and the new request and see if their classmates agree that these requests are more polite.

The teacher should go around the room checking grammar and pronunciation. When everyone is finished, do a quick feedback on any errors you heard and have some students read out their more polite requests.

Step 5: Scenarios (10 minutes)

Finally, cut up and pass out the following scenarios. Have students talk with partners about the scenario and discuss how they would respond to the situation. Remind them to soften their language and be polite.

The scenarios can be downloaded and printed here. Remember to cut them out before passing them out to students.

Step 6: Feedback (10 minutes)

Finally have students describe their scenarios to the class and explain their responses. The teacher should check that the requests are polite and softened based on the chart above.

If you want more advanced conversation lessons that you don’t have to prep, check out Advanced Conversation – Underground Apartments – Video – 1 hour.