Whether you are holding a meeting or attending a meeting, it is important that you understand key English phrases and expressions related to meetings so that you can communicate more confidently.
A successful meeting in English starts with good preparation
Good preparation before your meeting in English will lower the pressure and increase your confidence.
– It is ok to ask people to speak slower or explain themselves
– Learn key phrases that are used in your business sector in your lessons
– Listen to the radio in English prior to the meeting to become acclimatized to particular accents
– Use your lessons to practice bringing up a point in a meeting
– Ask your teacher to help you with business idioms and phrasal verbs
– Prepare in advance some questions that you want to ask during the meeting
– Meetings nowadays are often via Zoom, you might want to prepare for your meeting with English classes via Zoom and rehearse important ideas you’d like to convey
Here are 30 key phrases to use in your next meeting in English (face-to-face or Zoom!)
Opening a Meeting in English
Once everyone has arrived/is connected, the chairperson, or whoever is in charge of the meeting should formally welcome everyone to the meeting and thank the attendees for coming.
1. Well, since everyone is here, we should get started.
2. Hello, everyone. Thank you for coming today.
3. I think we’ll begin now. First, I’d like to welcome you all.
4. I really appreciate you all for attending today.
5. We have a lot to cover today, so we really should begin.
Asking someone to speak in a Meeting in English
Many people get to speak in a meeting. You might want to introduce a colleague who is going to talk about a specific item.
6. Now, John will tell us more about …
7. I would like to hand it over to Sarah, who can share more on this topic.
8. Paolo is now going to take over.
9. I’d like to hand you over to Jack who will talk you through …
10. Now I would like to introduce Betty who is going to talk about …
Staying Focused and on Time for your Meeting in English
One of the main issues with meetings is that they often take longer than scheduled. You want to keep an eye on the time and make sure you cover all the topics that were on the agenda. Here are some phrases to help you.
11. I think we’ve spent enough time on this topic.
12. We’re running short on time, so let’s move on.
13. We’re running behind schedule, so we’ll have to skip the next item.
14. We’ve spent too long on this issue, so we’ll leave it for now.
15. We’ll have to come back to this at a later time.
16. Let’s stick to the task at hand, shall we?
17. I think we’re steering off topic a bit with this.
18. Let’s save this for another meeting.
19. We’ve lost sight of the point here.
Summarizing a Meeting in English
A meeting is a great way to make sure that everyone is on the same page. To summarize the different points discussed, you can use one of the following sentences.
20. Here are some of the main points we discussed today.
21. To sum up, we’ve talked about …
22. I would like to briefly cover the topics we mentioned today.
23. Before we finish, let’s go over everything we talked about today.
24. Let’s quickly summarize the main points of today’s meeting.
Closing a Meeting in English
There are things to do when a meeting comes to an end. In particular, it’s always good to set the next meeting date and venue before everyone leaves.
25. I guess that will be all for today.
26. Well, look at that, we’ve finished ahead of schedule for once.
27. If no one has anything else to add, then I think we’ll wrap this up.
28. Again, I want to thank you all for taking time out of your busy schedules to be here today.
29. Thank you for your participation in today’s meeting.
30. We’ll meet again on the first of next month via Zoom.
Attending a meeting in English can be really stressful. I hope that these sentences will help you understand what is going on.
Remember, the key is preparation. If you are scared people will be speaking too fast, will be using idioms or unfamiliar phrases, or will have an accent that is difficult for you to understand, preparing for it will make a big difference. Check out our Professional and Business English Courses.
