top of page
Search
joelwhiteenglish

Explaining your Role and Responsibilities

Updated: Jan 15, 2023

These materials are designed to help you to prepare for a lesson on: Explaining your Role and Responsibilities.

An easily overlooked, but absolutely essential skill is being able to actually explain what it is that you actually do in your job. It's a brilliant opportunity to pick up on any essential vocabulary that you might be missing as well being better prepared for the time that you need to explain what you do.


Instructions:

  • Firstly, look at the preparation tasks that I have chosen to help you to develop this skill.

  • Then, look at the materials provided to help with your preparation tasks and in terms of your general understanding of this particular skill.

  • Lastly, complete the tasks prior to the lesson*. (Starting by having the student complete a preparation tasks gives me an understanding of the learners ability with this task to effectively ensure and build on their understanding of appropriate language and vocabulary, good use of grammar and clear communicational skills to communicate clearly, confidently and professionally in English).

*If it's not possible to complete the tasks outside of the lesson, then we can do this as part of a lesson. I prefer to give student the option of doing as much work in their own time as possible to be more cost efficient and to maximise learning.

____________________

The Preparation Tasks


Your task has arrived via email below;


____________________

The Materials

This task is about building the very specific vocabulary for your role, one way of identifying useful vocabulary for your role is to look at this Job Description Database which contains job descriptions for 12,000+ jobs - just scroll through the list to find the position that is (or is closest) to your role and read the description.


Then, think about the following questions to structure your answer to the task above;

  1. What would your job description actually say that you should be doing? how accurate is this? and what, if anything, is missing?

  2. What did you do yesterday, the last before, or last week - can you describe in detail everything that you did?

  3. What have you done in the last month? what about the last year? which tasks occur frequently, and which ones not so frequently?

  4. Does you role exist in isolation, or are you reliant on other peoples work? if so, how does your role fit with other peoples?

  5. How does your role fit into the company structure or hierarchy? do you supervise other people, if so, what do they do, and who supervises you?

  6. Imagine that you need someone to cover your exact job for the next two weeks - how would you explain to them what they need to do?

*the questions about might need some re-structuring to really reflect your specific role, so they are just a guide and I can easily help any students to find more useful questions as needed.


Grammar: Aside from being a good vocabulary building excercise, this kind of task does require students to take certain grammatical structures into consideration, for examples your answers will include as mix of...

  • ...temporary actions: "I am currently managing a team of 6 people, though we are expecting three new starters in January"

  • ....as well as regular or repeated actions: "I meet with my team every Monday to discuss our current progress on all tasks".

  • ...there might be other tense considerations related to duration or the order of actions; "I have been responsible for this task for the last two weeks.... but I will stop doing this as of January 2023..." or "before outsourcing this work to another team, I had managed the project entirely alone".

Again, while the excercise is really good for identifying vocabulary, it is an excellent opportunity to work on good use of grammar and when used as the basis of a discussion, offers some really good targeted practice with talking about your role more fluently.


____________________

Finished


Having looked at the materials and completed the preparation tasks, you are ready for the lesson. Send anything you have prepared to me if you would like me to look at it before the lesson - joel.white.english@gmail.com


63 views0 comments

Recent Posts

See All

Comments


Post: Blog2_Post
bottom of page