Everyone wants to sound smart. Yet, when we speak a foreign language, our ideas get watered down by simplistic language (😩). How can we help learners overcome this problem? Cue ... smart expressions!

To help you out, we've gathered smart expressions below that’ll allow your students to cleverly handle three key parts of discussions: providing reasons, making predictions, and giving recommendations.

Expressions for Explaining Why

Some discussion questions ask students to provide a possible reason for something. For example, “How would you explain the rise of hate speech on the internet?”

Encourage intermediate students to go beyond, “I think this is because ...” and instead try the following expressions:

Notice the modal expressions – “may,” "might," and “probably” – in the examples above. These allow students to avoid expressing absolute certainty when they’re not 100% sure of their response.

Since “How would you explain”-type questions generally require students to provide what they think is a possible reason, students will feel more comfortable sharing their opinions when they're taught these modal expressions.

Often, advanced students want to express correlation instead of causation, but lack the expressions to do that. If you sense hesitation or hear them say something like, “This is kind of because …” or “Maybe this is because …,” you can suggest the following expressions:

• Rises in hate speech are often associated with …
• Rises in hate speech are often related to …

If a student wants to provide more than one reason, encourage them to start with, "There are several possible reasons/explanations for the rise in hate crime."

Expressions for Making Predictions

Some discussion questions ask students to make predictions. For example:

• “How might greater diversity benefit the tech industry as a whole?”
• “Do you believe that economic cooperation between North and South Korea will speed up the denuclearization process?”

If your student starts with “I think” or “I guess,” you might want to suggest the following alternatives:

The main difference between the intermediate and advanced expressions is that the advanced ones include conditional phrases like “given that” and “seeing as,” which allow for more nuance.

Expressions for Providing Recommendations

Questions such as, “What could governments do to encourage people to buy environmentally friendly cars?” ask students to give recommendations.

Encourage your students to go beyond, “I think the government should …” and try the following:

Students who have multiple suggestions can structure their responses like this:

• The government has a few options.
• One option would be to raise the price of traditional cars.
• Another option would be to subsidize environmentally friendly cars.
• A third option would be to raise the gasoline tax.

Advanced students can also qualify their statements with limitations and other considerations:

• However, there would need to be public support for a gasoline tax.
• While taxing gasoline is important, the government should also improve public transportation systems to decrease reliance on cars and motorcycles.

👋 That’s it for now!

What did you think of these expressions? Which ones do you plan to introduce to students or use yourself? If you liked this post, see this post on expressions for providing opinions.

Finally, if you want to copy and paste the expressions, here they are in text format.

Reasons

• might be because ...
• can be explained by ...
• was probably caused by ...
• may be a result of ...
• might stem from ...
• could be attributed to ...
• may be due to ...
• A possible explanation might be that ...

Predictions

• My guess is that ...
• I'm not convinced that ...
• The data suggest that ...
• History shows that ...
• Given that / Seeing as ... I'm not convinced that ...

Recommendations

• should consider ...
• should focus on ...
• One solution/option would be to ...
• It would help to ...
• It would make sense to ...
• A reasonable/sensible approach would be to ...
• One way forward is to ...
• A key priority would be to ...
• It would be in their interest to ...

• discussion
• pragmatics