Leave A Message At The Beep: 5 Simple Activities To Help Improve Your ESL Students’ Phone Skills

Most of the time, they take little to no time to prepare, and they challenge both your students’ listening and speaking skills. Because telephone conversations do not happen face to face, the lack of visual clues can make these conversations a challenge for any nonnative speaker, and that’s a big reason why you should include them in class. Give your students a chance to practice their long distance conversation skills so they will be better prepared when the phone rings at home. Each of these role-plays focuses on a different skill. Choose the one or ones that best meet your students’ needs and get the conversation started in class.
Role-playing a telephone conversation is a great way to give your students practice in writing reported speech. To do the activity, all you need is two students, one with paper and pencil for taking a message. Have your students sit back to back so they cannot use nonverbal cues to understand what their partner is saying. That way the role-play will be more like a real telephone conversation. Have person A pretend to call person B. After person B answers, person A should ask for someone by name who is not a member of the class. They can ask for a celebrity if they like to make the activity more entertaining or just make up a name for a fictional person. Person B should say, “I’m sorry. __________ isn’t here. Can I take a message?” Person A should then give their message to person B. For example, the conversation might go like this.
Now that the conversation is over, person B will have to write down person A’s message using reported speech. The message might read something like this: Jorge called for you. He said he found a light saber. He was wondering if it was yours. After person B writes down the message, the two students should switch roles, and this time person A takes the message from person B. Switch partners as many times as you like. You might even have some students perform their role-play in front of the class and then write their message on the board so everyone can see.
Often when we make phone calls, it is to set up an appointment or reschedule an appointment we have already made. These conversations are great for practicing numbers, time phrases, and dates, all of which can be challenging for ESL students since they involve the use of numbers. For this role-play, again have students sit back to back. One student will play the receptionist or scheduler at a doctor’s office, and the other student will play the patient. The patient should call the doctor’s office to schedule or reschedule their appointment. They should tell the scheduler when they have an appointment scheduled and that they would like to change it. The scheduler should give the patient two or three options for a new appointment, and the patient should choose one. The scheduler should then confirm the new appointment time. The conversation might go something like this.
If you like, put your students in groups of four or five and have one person play the scheduler in all the conversations. That person will then have to keep list of appointment times in front of them as they talk to their group mates and schedule appointments for each of them.
With so many businesses working over long distances these days, conference calls have become the norm rather than the exception. But conference calls aren’t like just another business meeting. There are protocols to follow for conference calls. You can give your business minded students a chance to practice these protocols by creating a role-play conference call. Start by reviewing conference call etiquette. Here are some general guidelines to follow during conference calls.
When it is time to role-play the conference call, have students get in groups of four or five. Assign one person to be the facilitator or leader of the call. Have each person pretend to be from a different company. Give each group a reason for the call. You might want to use topics such as the following.
Whether your students are just beginning their language studies or are ready to take on the English speaking world, telephone role-plays will be beneficial to their English education. The more practice ESL students get with telephone conversations, the better they will be at communicating over the telephone lines.