As difficult as it is to chair a meeting or give a presentation in English, perhaps nothing compares to having to chat about almost anything for an hour over dinner while also making suitable offers, dealing with requests, etc. There are then the very different challenges of taking clients to sporting events, accompanying them to cultural sites, etc. This article gives teaching tips to help students prepare for this ultimate challenge. Elsewhere on this site there is also a list of useful socialising phrases, articles on related topics like restaurant language and invitations, and an e-book with over 350 pages of photocopiable materials on this and other social English topics (https://www.usingenglish.com/e-books/social-english/).
What students need to know about business socialising
The main things that you’ll need to teach for students to be able to be good hosts are, in approximate chronological order of when students would do them outside the classroom:
- Choosing and explaining suitable places to go
- Inviting
- Making arrangements for meeting, including giving directions and/ or sharing a map
- Explaining and recommending things while they are there
- Offering and dealing with requests
- Chatting (about topics which are related to where they are and about unrelated topics)
- Smoothly ending
- Talking about payment
- Thanking and dealing with thanks
- Talking about future contact
- Saying goodbye
Students could also be the guest in the future, so will need to also take on the other role and learn to deal with invitations, ask about the place, make compliments, offer future hospitality, etc.
They will also need to understand and explain cultural differences about which places are considered good to go, how many times the guest should offer to pay, suitable small talk topics, etc.
Classroom business socialising activities
Preparation could basically follow the steps above, starting with practising choosing places and ending with roleplaying saying goodbye. This would obviously take more than one lesson, but this much work is justifiable even for students who won’t socialise in English soon, because the related vocabulary, functional language and information on cultural differences is also useful for other situations. Furthermore, it’s easy to incorporate useful emailing and telephoning practice.
For the first topic above, ask students to brainstorm suitable and unsuitable places for business entertaining, then ask them to choose more examples of both categories from a list. The list should include a mix of suitable places which they might not have thought about such as go karting, unsuitable places which they might have thought about like the red-light district, and local places that would need to be explained to guests. Answer any questions about ones they don’t understand, don’t know how to explain, or are not sure of the suitability of, discussing their suitability each time. Then get them to match the ones which are difficult to explain to suitable explanations. They can then use what they remember from those explanations as they roleplay explaining places to foreign guests, with their partner pretending to have no knowledge of the local area and local culture.
Explaining can also be made into a bluffing game, with students choosing a place at random, making up what they don’t know when their partner asks them questions about that place/ thing, then their partner guessing what was just imagination.
Explaining can also be practised during invitations practice. One student chooses a place (their own choice or at random), invites a guest, explains the place, deals with their reaction, then tries again if the guest says no. After finishing that mini-roleplay, they can then discuss the real suitability or not of that thing, including if the guest would probably really have that reaction or not. After a few of these mini-roleplays, they can discuss the suitability of other things on the list.
Doing invitations this way can help make sure that there is a good mix of positive and (polite) negative reactions from the person playing the role of the guest. This can also be achieved by asking them to make the responses more or less 50/50, asking them to flip a coin each time that a place is explained, or asking them to say no as many times as possible before the host finally finds something that they can’t politely reject. If you use a dice, it can decide the reactions (1-3 = positive reaction, 4-6 = negative reaction) and also how to communicate (1 or 2 = by email, etc).
After a presentation of the language of invitations such as asking them to recall the phrases on the worksheet that they were just using, ask them to do practise inviting each other again, but this time extending the conversations to include arranging a time and explaining the place to meet.
If you have followed all these preparatory steps, it should be easy for students to then extend the next conversation to meeting, greeting and speaking at the place they have chosen, e.g. in the bar or restaurant. The guest should again pretend to be completely ignorant, so that the host has to explain things like local dishes on the menu, how to share food, and how to eat things (using utensils like chopsticks, etc), etc.
In places other than restaurants, the host might need to explain who the people there are (referee, etc), what is happening, the hidden meanings of things, the history of things, etc. This can be practised by giving the guest a big list of questions like “What’s happening now?” and “What’s this made of?” and asking them to only ask the suitable ones for the situation that they are roleplaying.
Choosing from a big list of phrases is also good for practice of requests and offers such as “Can you tell me which things are vegetarian?”, “Can you translate the safety instructions for me?”, “Would you like another pint?” and “Shall I explain what the story is?” Positive and negative responses can be decided with a coin, dice, etc, as with invitations above.
After a mix of requests, offers and explanations of the place, conversation should then naturally turn to related topics such as:
- The same things in other places (e.g. similar restaurants in the guest’s hometown)
- Other recommendations of what the guest should do in that area
- Where the guest lives
- How people spend their leisure time
- Travel
- Cultural differences
Conversation could then turn to almost any small talk topic. If you give them topics as a list or on cards, they could discuss which are probably the best and worst subjects, tick them off as they smoothly progress through them during a roleplay, or put a several topics in order before speaking and then try to smoothly progress between those subjects without any sudden changes.
In real life, students can prepare for this stage by finding out which topics are good and taboo in a place that they might visit or where their future guests might come from. Other things that they can research about the place they might go or socialise with someone from include:
- Sports teams
- Sightseeing spots/ Landmarks
- Recent news
- Famous moments in history
- Famous people
- Transport
- Other places nearby
This can be done in class via the internet or as homework. For example, students A and B could tell each other a city which one of their big clients come from, and for homework they research both their own and their partner’s choice of places so that they will be able to roleplay being both the guest and host in the next lesson. Or for more general practice of this skill, ask students to tell each other their real hometown, then they just research each other’s place of origin to make for smoother roleplays in the following lesson.
Smoothly ending is one of the most difficult things to practise in class, as you don’t have an hour or two to roleplay a realistic situation. Possibilities include giving students a fixed number of small talk topics and/ or a strict time limit, after which they should smoothly finish. Alternatively, you could just ask them to finish smoothly when the time seems right, e.g. when the guest wants no more food or drink. After finishing the roleplay, they discuss how smooth or not the ending was. They can then try again, perhaps with a list of suggested final steps such as talking about payment, thanking, talking about future contact, and saying goodbye. They could also put together a jigsaw text of just the ending and then analyse the steps in it, or listen to similar endings to classify as good or bad.
Business socialising review games and activities
Good and bad business socialising activities
Judging if things are good and bad is also good for reviewing socialising, with students listening to different phrases or responses and writing down or shouting out which is the best. The bad options could be rude, the wrong function, grammatically incorrect, etc. If you want to present lots of useful correct phrases this way, you can also do the opposite activity of asking students to identify the one bad line.
Business socialising simplest responses games
Instead of shouting out, you can get students to hold up cards to show which of two things they think they are hearing. For example, if you give them cards with “Positive” and “Negative” written on them, they can hold up one when they hear reactions to invitations, reactions to offers, reactions to the food when it comes, etc. For practice of every stage and every kind of socialising, they can do the same with cards saying “Guest” and “Host”.
Business socialising board games
The step-by-step nature of socialising means that it is perfect for a board game. To make students think about their speaking and to get them to listen more carefully, it’s best if they progress from square to square by how well they do when they roleplay the situation described in their square (without using a dice, etc). The simplest way of doing this is them giving each other between one point and six points depending on if their partner's performance was not terrible, okay, quite good, very good, excellent or perfect.
A more complicated but often better version is a Business Socialising Meeting Criteria Board Game. Give students a list of six or so specific criteria to meet. After the roleplay they decide if their partner met criteria like “1. polite, 2. friendly, 3. explained in a way that a foreign guest would understand” and then they give their partner one point for each thing they did successfully. They then move on one square for each of the criteria that was met.
Business socialising step by step roleplays
A simpler way of working through socialising step by step is to roleplay just the first step (inviting), switch roles and roleplay the first two steps (inviting and making arrangements for where to meet), switch again and roleplay the first three steps, etc. If this will be too heavy and/ or too time consuming, you can get students to roleplay steps one and two, then steps two and three, then three and four, etc, switching roles each time.
Business socialising card games
To make students think about and expand the language they use while they roleplay a whole socialising situation, you can set up a functions card game where they have cards that say “explain”, “request”, “ask for explanation”, etc, with several of each kind of card in the pack. They deal out the cards then must do those things with language that no one has used so far to be allowed to discard cards from their hand. The same thing can be done with cards which each have a key word for socialising phrases like “afraid”, “something like” and “pay”, with any suitable phrase for the situation using that word allowed.
Business socialising sentence completion activities
A more controlled activity is to give students useful sentences with gaps for them to complete like “Something that tourists never do but you might enjoy is ___________________”, “The most exciting thing to do together would be ______________”, “_____________ is an acquired taste” and “That was really unique. I’ve never experienced anything like that before. In return, I’d like to invite you to __________________”. Perhaps after trying to use them in real time in a roleplay, ask them to discuss their ideas for things to put in the gaps. You can then test them on their memories of the phrases that they just completed, e.g. by making gaps in the functional language like “_______ most exciting…”
Business socialising cultural differences and useful phrases
Students read descriptions of socialising in different countries with example phrases like “In Korea, the guest should almost fight to be allowed to pay (‘No, no, no. I insist. Please allow me.’”). They tick any cultural descriptions which are the same in their country, then they try to remember or think of suitable phrases to do those things if they need to (“In Korea, the guest should almost fight to be allowed to pay ‘___________________’” etc).
Business socialising problem roleplays
Tricky situations which students could discuss or roleplay include guests who have tried almost everything that there is to try in that city, people with very restrictive diets, limited budgets, limited time, or very extended time. You could also give them a list of things to tricky things to explain which they should include when they are roleplaying invitations, eating together, etc.
Business socialising dice games
A dice can decide which of six places they take the guest, which of six lengths of time to spend speaking, how many steps they have to roleplay, which level of formality, how many small talk topics, etc.