Business English: Describing a Project (PDF)

Describing a project in English is two skills, not one. Inside the team it is a status update: short, factual, focused on what changed since last week and what is holding you up. Outside the team, in a job interview or a client call, it is a project story, where the background is the whole point. The vocabulary overlaps almost completely. The structure does not, and most learners only ever rehearse one of the two.

This worksheet builds B2 fluency in both, around a four-move framework: scope, timeline, status, outcome.

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Worksheet preview

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What’s inside:

• A phrase bank organised by the four moves, with a register note on hedging bad news
• Fourteen core project words: scope, deliverable, milestone, blocker, bottleneck, stakeholder, sign-off, scope creep, roll out, handover, lessons learned and more
• A realistic three-speaker stand-up transcript, including a scope-creep request handled in real time
• Comprehension check (True/False/Not Mentioned)
• Move-identification exercise across eight authentic phrases
• Meeting-to-email transformation: an eight-gap written status update
• Guided writing: describe your own project in 120 to 150 words, with sentence starters
• Two-role role play with a listener’s checklist, plus reflection questions
• Full Answer Key plus Teacher Notes

Common challenges: hedging is the hard part at B2. “We’re slightly behind schedule” is normal professional English; “We have failed” is not, even when it is true. German speakers tend to under-hedge and land as blunt, while Romance-language speakers often over-hedge until the deadline risk disappears into the politeness. The Teacher Notes include a two-minute hedging drill built for exactly this.

For: Adult and teenage learners (14+) at CEFR B2, reaching down to B1, in upper-intermediate classes, 1:1 lessons or self-study, particularly working professionals. Part of the worksheet library’s Business English collection and the natural partner to Problem-Solving at Work: this sheet gets the real status out of the room, that one decides what to do about it.