Appointment Complications (Intermediate-Advanced)

Practice on Your Own

• Imagine you are studying or working in a country where the language is spoken. While you are there, you may need to make an appointment with a doctor, professor, study abroad office, hairdresser, etc. Make a list of places you might need to visit. Write a sentence about who you would see and why you would need to go there.
• Now think of reasons you might need to miss or cancel an appointment: emergency, illness, the bus was late, and so on. Create two or three short dialogues based on different reasons. Include the appropriate greetings, explanations, and apologies, making the conversations as long as you need to in order to be polite. Practice the dialogues out loud.

• Adjust your dialogues to ask about rescheduling instead of cancellation. Explain the problem from your list above, and practice naming days and times that work better for you, or asking when the office has another opening. If you know how to express future actions, be sure to mention any future plans, i.e. “I will be free next Tuesday.”

  Practice in Conversation Session

• Be prepared to role play situations in which you cancel or reschedule an appointment. For example:
  • You made a doctor’s appointment but you just found out that your exam was scheduled at the same time.
  • You were going to meet your study abroad advisor, but the traffic is so bad that your bus is late and you will not be able to get there on time.
  • You missed a scheduled meeting with a professor because of an emergency, and now you need to apologize and explain what happened.
  • You made an appointment for a haircut on Saturday afternoon, but your host family is going to attend a wedding that day and you need to go with them. See if you can reschedule the appointment to get your hair cut before the wedding.
• Confirm with your conversation partner that you know the most appropriate way to talk to a secretary/receptionist and how to be polite when changing an agreed-upon plan.