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•
Ask students if they have meetings with other people – some 
of them might meet with members of the public, for example.
A
Colleague Council Meeting
1
Use the instructions in Exercise 1 to explain the meaning 
of Colleague Council (Meeting). A lot of companies have a 
similar set-up, which may well be known by a different name, 
e.g. 
Staff Council
, 
Staff Forum
, 
Staff Liaison Committee
. Get 
students to tick the correct sentence. 
2
Get students to scan the text to fi nd the answer. After 
checking the answer, elicit that 
attendees
are people who 
attend the meeting and 
apologies
are sent by people who 
cannot attend.
3–4
Get students to read the minutes in more detail to answer 
these questions. Ask students who work if they can get grants 
from their organization to do courses.
5
Discuss the questions as a whole class.
Focus on … reported speech
You could point out to students that the rules for reported speech 
are more applicable to written rather than spoken English.
More activities
1
Elicit or explain that you can 
chair a meeting
. Ask students 
to suggest other collocations with 
a meeting
. (Examples 
include: 
address, adjourn, arrange, ban, boycott, break 
up, call, call off, cancel, close, conduct, convene, disrupt, 
have, hold, host, open, organize, postpone, schedule, 
summon
).
2
Students create another point (7) for the minutes. First 
of all, they write an email about another issue in their 
workplace that they would like the Colleague Council to 
address. They then exchange their email with another 
student, who now has to imagine that they work in the 
Personnel Department. In this role, they have to summarize 
Personnel’s view of the issue in their partner’s email and 
then state the response. Students should use the same 
format as in the minutes.