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Read by Coach Nigel Casey · 3 min read audio
You can handle yourself in a meeting when someone else is leading it. But the moment you are the one who has to open, steer contributions, cut off a rambling colleague, park a tangent, and close with clear next steps, the cognitive load multiplies. Suddenly you are managing the room and translating your authority into a second language at the same time. This clinic gives B2-C1 professionals the exact phrases and structures that native-speaking chairs rely on, so that running a meeting in English feels as controlled and natural as it does in your first language.
The hardest part of chairing in English is not vocabulary; it is that polite control in English sounds indirect, and most non-native speakers either come across as too blunt or too passive because nobody taught them where the authority actually lives in an English sentence.
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Meet Camille.
She is preparing to chair a cross-functional project status meeting tomorrow morning with six international colleagues, and needs to open it with clarity and authority in under ninety seconds.
Sophie
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What You'll Learn in This Session
In Week 4 of the Thursday Fluency Clinic, we're focusing on the exact phrases that make the difference between sounding hesitant and sounding confident.
Here are the 5 key phrases we'll practise together:
- —Let's get started. We have three items to cover and I'd like us to wrap up by quarter past.
- —I'd like to bring [Name] in here. What's your take on this?
- —That's a valid point. Let's park that for now and come back to it at the end.
- —Can I just pull us back to the original question before we move on?
- —So, to summarise what we've agreed: [decision], [owner], [deadline]. Does that match everyone's understanding?
Common Mistakes to Avoid
These are the most common L1 interference traps — patterns from your first language that trip up intermediate learners:
- —Italian speakers often say 'We are in eight people today' (direct translation of 'Siamo in otto'), instead of 'There are eight of us today', which sounds unnatural and undermines a confident opening.
- —German speakers tend to say 'We should discuss about the timeline' (influenced by 'über etwas diskutieren'), when English requires 'discuss the timeline' with no preposition.
- —French speakers frequently say 'I propose you to move to the next point' (calque from 'je vous propose de'), instead of the correct 'I suggest we move to the next point', which can sound awkward to native ears.
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Join us this Thursday for the live clinic session. You'll get 60 minutes of focused speaking practice with immediate feedback, in a small group of 6–12 learners.
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