Fun ways to practise functional language in Business English

Doing business in English is next to impossible without mastering the art of leading a conversation, spoken or written, and adequately responding to suggestions, questions or requests. Courtesy and etiquette, professionalism, integrity, empathy and other soft skills depend tremendously on how well an individual can express different functions, such as making arrangements, enquiring, confirming and clarifying, handling complaints, starting and ending phone calls smoothly, etc.
Here are a few entertaining activities that can help students learn how to use functional language effectively.

1. Sound-on-video

When working with a video (which might be a fragment from a movie/TV program or a video supplementary material from the course book), you might eventually switch the sound off and ask your students to ‘voice’ the actors. Depending on the length of the video and the difficulty of the language in it, you may ask the learners to do it from memory or to hand out partially gapped subtitles, where the target language is missing. Obviously, this must be preceded with introduction and practice of the target language, and followed by a role-play with the same functional language involved.

For example, after presenting and practicing the language of chairing the meeting, watching the video and analyzing the phrases used in it, students may be given gapped audio scripts and asked to ‘dub’ the film. This will allow to practice functional language, e.g. phrases ‘Let’s get started’, ‘Has everyone got a copy of the agenda?’, ‘Can I draw your attention to…’, ‘I plan to break at around 11.15’, ‘Perhaps I can begin by asking…’ etc.

2. Typical responses

You can recycle functional language by asking students to provide responses to questions and statements common in business context. You may want to stay within one function, e.g. telephoning a colleague, or give random lines from a variety of contexts. Since the responses are pretty standard, it is easy to teach and practice them, for example, by matching phrases and responses or by asking to choose the best one in each situation (like in this handout).

Thus, perhaps as a warmer, you may ask a student to respond to the following lines:

• Good morning. British Council. Alex Case speaking. How may I help you?
• I’m afraid I don’t know much about your industry.
• How was your flight?
• Sorry, I am late. Have you been waiting long?
• It’s so nice to finally meet face to face.
• Can I speak to the person in charge of the pharmaceutical conference?
• Horrible weather, isn’t it?

You can also play it in the reverse way – provide responses and make students guess the initial line.

3. Exaggerated roles

It is often fun to ask students to act in an exaggerated way in a roleplay. For instance, you can assign additional roles of ‘Constant Interrupter’ or ‘One who never hears anything clearly’ and provide sets of corresponding phrases for the learners to use during the roleplay.

The set of phrases to use, say, for the role of ‘Active Listener’ would probably include some of the following items:

• Do you mean…?
• I’m not sure I understand.
• Could you tell me a bit more about that?
• Really?
• It sounds like…
• Let me make sure I’ve got this right.
• I get the impression that …
• I understand the problem as …
• Correct me if I’m wrong …
• What I hear you saying is…
• In your experience…
• Is there any chance that you…?

4. Following the pattern

Another fun and creative activity could be completing business correspondence with student’s own ideas. All you need is to keep standard phrases there and to remove the rest from an email, or the other way around. Learners can then fill in the spaces with their own thoughts.

So, here’s an example of such a text to be completed:

From: …

To: Angela Jones

Subject: ….

Dear Ms Jones

This email is to notify you that I am resigning my position as …  effective …. My last day of employment will be ….. This includes the required …. period.
I have enjoyed working here very much and I want to thank you and the whole sales team for …… In order to achieve my long term career goals I …
Please know that …
Again, it has been a pleasure …

Sincerely
Your Name