The lesson starts with a warm-up in which students look at the examples of difficult conversations (e.g. firing someone, refusing to lend money to someone, dealing with a very upset customer, etc.) and discuss them. Students can also think about their own examples of difficult conversations they’ve had recently. This ESL lesson about communication also includes a vocabulary activity in which students complete the pairs of sentences with one word from the provided list (e.g. hijack, validate, untangle, etc.). The sentences present both meanings of the word – literal and figurative. Then, students practise the vocabulary more. They read the statements again and decide what might have happened so that people said them.