Weddings

This pre-intermediate wedding ESL lesson gets students talking about wedding traditions around the world, discussing common wedding elements, and learning practical ESL wedding vocabulary. Learners watch a short video featuring surprising Korean wedding traditions and compare those customs with the weddings they’re familiar with in their own countries. Students practice new wedding vocabulary through matching tasks, fill-in-the-blanks, category sorting, and quick ESL error correction activities. The lesson also includes photo-based discussions of royal weddings, celebrity weddings, and pop-star weddings, helping students build stronger speaking skills. Everything wraps up with a short ESL writing task where learners describe a wedding they have attended (or a wedding they’d love to attend) using the new wedding and culture vocabulary.

Teaching Guide

Lead-in
This wedding ESL lesson opens with a communicative lead-in where students discuss weddings in their countries. They share opinions about wedding traditions, typical wedding elements, and their own experiences attending ceremonies. Using emojis as prompts, learners brainstorm as many ESL wedding vocabulary items as they can, helping activate prior knowledge and build confidence. This stage reinforces cultural awareness and sets up the lesson’s theme of wedding customs around the world.

Vocabulary, Practice, Questions
In the next stage, students learn ten key wedding-related vocabulary words commonly used in ESL pre-intermediate wedding lessons. They start with a vocabulary-definition matching activity, then move on to a fill-in-the-blanks exercise where they use the new words in context. Afterward, students read a short story and create one question for each sentence, practicing the target words through guided ESL wedding speaking tasks. This supports accuracy, comprehension, and fluency as part of a structured A2/B1 ESL culture lesson.

Video, Comprehension
Students watch a short video about surprising Korean wedding traditions, making this a partially video-based ESL wedding lesson. They watch the clip twice to improve comprehension, then answer a set of questions about what they learned. After that, students discuss which facts were the most surprising and how Korean customs compare to weddings in their own cultures. This section strengthens listening skills and encourages meaningful cultural comparison, an essential part of a wedding traditions ESL lesson.

Categories, Mistakes, Discussion
Next, students sort vocabulary into categories such as wedding fashion, wedding length or style, food and entertainment, gifts, and other cultural elements. This reinforces understanding of how wedding traditions vary across countries. Then, they complete an ESL error correction task with six sentences, each containing one mistake related to weddings. After correcting the errors, students discuss Korean weddings and weddings in general, expanding their speaking fluency through culturally relevant questions that fit the theme of ESL wedding discussion activities.

Pictures, Homework
Students then examine three photos of famous weddings: a royal wedding, a celebrity wedding, and a pop-star wedding. Each slide includes guiding questions that help them describe the images, compare the weddings, and practice vocabulary such as dress, ceremony, guests, and traditions. For homework, learners write five sentences about a wedding they attended (or a wedding they’d love to attend) using at least five new wedding vocabulary words. This writing task helps consolidate the language and serves as a practical extension of the wedding traditions ESL lesson.