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Sample Speaking Situations Used to Improve the English of Non-U.S.-Born Professionals
Improving communication with clients, project managers, supervisors, senior management, or other internal or external customers.
Several of these have also been used as writing activities.
Listed in no particular order of importance:
- Updating your manager on the status of a current project.
- Meeting a client for the first time.
- Visiting a client site for the first time. You will be working at this location for the next several weeks.
- Pushing back professionally and respectfully to unexpected/unrealistic deadlines from client or project manager.
- Communicating changes/new priorities to team members.
- Informal, get-to-know-you small talk with visiting executive.
- Acknowledging and taking ownership of the discovery of a mistake in your data.
- “Breaking the ice.” Initiating a formal or informal conversation with a familiar or unfamiliar colleague.
- Speaking on the phone (any topic). How is it different from face-to-face conversation?
- Working in a group to reach consensus on an important decision before moving forward.
- Explaining to a new/prospective client what can/cannot be done by your team.
- Assuring a new client about data security.
- Assuring a new client about the qualifications/experience of your team.
- Telling a prospective employee about your company/your team.
- Small talk with a newly-hired employee who will be joining your team, focusing on the corporate culture of the company and the team.
- Having “tough conversations” or delivering bad news to members of your team.
- Facilitating more effective meetings
- Adding something to a conversation in which you were not expected to contribute.
- Validating/building on someone’s comments at a meeting.
- Simulated job interview (with you as the interviewer).
- Small talk with a colleague as a meeting is ending.
- At the lunch table with a familiar or unfamiliar colleague.
- Phone conversation with higher-level manager.
- Talking to a client or project manager who asks, “Can you assure us that this model will work?”
- Small talk with someone of a very different cultural background.
- Review your PowerPoint presentation (practice talking over your slides)
- Round table discussion after a training. Share one key ”takeaway” which will help you perform your job more effectively.
- Taking a position and defending it. (For example, which of 3 software products would you recommend to senior management and why? Discuss pros and cons and give your recommendation.) (Or—you interviewed 3 candidates for an open position. Which of the 3 would you recommend be hired and why?).
- Explaining to senior management what happened in an earlier conversation with another employee, client, etc. and making a recommendation for what should happen next.
- Preparing for a performance review (as an employee or as a supervisor)
- Being persuasive. Encouraging a peer or subordinate to do something that he/she does not want to do.
- Asking your manager to take on a new project.
- Putting together a team for a new project. Setting expectations, timelines, scope of work and communication protocols.
- Bringing team members up to speed on an existing but changing project.
- Using polite interruptions. Refocusing discussion in a meeting when it drifts off topic.