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 Students practise explaining or discussing some of their company’s products or services, using authentic materials as a starting point.
Level: intermediate and above
Time: 1 hour
Preparation:
Ask students to bring in copies of their company’s sales literature. As well as bringing in brochures or leaflets, they should print off any web pages their company may currently use or even try and obtain copies of responses to customer enquiries about specific products or services.
(Note: You may prefer to obtain some authentic material yourself, if this is feasible.) If your students are not yet working, obtain a range of sales literature which you think may interest your students. Obtain all this material in advance of your lesson and make copies for all your students.
Procedure:
1. Tell students to imagine some visitors are coming to their company. Ask them to decide precisely who the visitors are (in pairs or groups of three) and what they might want to know or discuss. Suggest, perhaps, that they might imagine visitors coming from their company’s head office or from a potential partner for a joint venture.
2. Using the sales literature for inspiration or information, students should then write out a possible dialogue with a visitor. They can continue working in their pairs or groups of three. While you are monitoring, encourage students to use less formal language than that used in the sales literature (or other material) and to imagine and include interesting ‘background’ details which their visitor might want to discuss. Correct and provide language as necessary.
3. Ask students to extract from their script a list of questions the visitor might ask. Get them to write these out on a separate piece of paper.
4. Finally, ask students to role-play their conversations with various partners, having first given their ‘visitors’ a list of questions to ask.
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