The role of security guard can vary widely from something like a bodyguard to a heavily-armed ex-forces professional guarding something very dangerous and/ or valuable, but this article is mainly based on the most common situation of someone who stands around in an ordinary office building, shopping centre, gallery, etc. However, most of the things here can be used or adapted for other kinds of security guard.
Typical security guards are most likely to have to do these things in English:
- ask (or sometimes command) people to do things such as open their bags or wait
- explain rules such as where smoking is and isn’t allowed
- give bad news such as things which are not available
- answer questions, including give directions
- talk about things in the building such as the elevator
- talk about things in the local area such as taxi ranks
Some guards might also have a supervisor who speaks English and so need to receive training and other instructions, fill in incident reports, etc. There might also be a need to give announcements over the public address system.
Typical problems with using English for security guards
Even more than in other jobs, my security guard students can have problems choosing between orders (“Stop here”) and requests (“Can you take off your mask so I can check your face against your photo?”), and in fact in many situations both are possible depending on how authoritative or polite they want to be.
The other difficulty related to the character of their job is that they will often use a very limited amount of and range of English day to day, but need to be ready to deal with unexpected situations like a fire, odd things found during the bag check, and being asked how to get to the British Embassy.
How to present English for security guards
The variations in the job of security guard can be used at the presentation stage, by giving students a model dialogue and getting them to guess the situation (e.g. at a trade fair) and discuss how similar or different it is to exchanges they have (in English and/ or L1). They can also grade the guards on criteria such as how polite they are being. Then they can underline useful language such as the categories given above.
If your students have good knowledge of English but using it as a security guard is new to them, they could also start with a language task such as adding missing grammar words to a dialogue, then move onto looking at it again for useful vocabulary and phrases.
Some practice activities below can also be used at the presentation stage.
How to practise English for security guards
Guard and public jigsaw dialogues
Find or write a conversation between a security guard and someone who is visiting their building. Cut it up and shuffle the cards, then ask students to put it back into order. It can be cut up:
- with each line of the exchange on a different piece of paper
- after each thing that the member of the public says (so with each card having two lines)
- halfway through lines
If they have to deal with a boss in English, you could also cut up a conversation with that person. For more challenge, you could also mix up two different dialogues and get students to divide them up and put each one in order.
Guard and others simplest responses game
Students listen to typical phrases that security guards say like “Can you show me your security card?” or phrases that they often hear like “Which floor is the clinic on?”. After hearing one phrase, they race to raise a card saying “Guard” or a card saying “Others” depending on who they think is speaking.
They label the same phrases on a worksheet with “G” for “guard” and “O” for “others”. They can then label the sections with more specific categories like “Asking people to wait” and/ or be tested on how many phrases they remember.
Good and bad security guard responses
Students listen to things that security guards might hear like “My badge doesn’t seem to be working” and at least two different responses like “Can I have a look at it?” and “Why did you break it?”. They then race to choose the best response and show which they have chosen. This can be done by shouting out A, B or C, holding up cards saying “A” and “B”, etc.
If there are several good things that could be said in each situation, you can also do the opposite of students trying to identify the one bad response.
Security guard responses matching
Make a list of things that security guards might hear or say which have several possible good responses, like “Have a nice day” with the responses “You too”, “Thank you, you too” and “And the same to you. Bon voyage”. Put the prompt and each response onto different cards. Students try to match up the prompts and responses, perhaps before being told how many there are for each.
After checking their answers, they can then try to respond correctly to the prompts with no help, and/ or extend those pairs of phrases into whole conversations.
Security guard problem roleplays
Most security guard conversations are as little as two lines (“Can I see your security pass, please? Thank you”) but they also need to be ready for many more unusual situations. It can therefore be both stimulating and useful to get them to deal with more rarer and even strange situations like “The visitor has a small animal”, “The visitor is too large to fit through the metal detector” and “All the elevators have broken down”.