Small Talk
For foreign students, small talk often presents a challenge for developing English conversation skills. It is often a double issue: a language challenge and a cultural issue.
This is particularly true when talking about your routine private life with English-speaking colleagues and friends. It is PS English’s experience that our students struggle with making small talk around regular social activities outside of working hours.
They will regularly get asked questions like:
- “Do you have any plans for the weekend?”, on a Friday afternoon
- “Did you have a good weekend?”, on a Monday morning.
These types of so-called friendly questions are extremely common in the UK.
In this series, we look at some common short, fixed expressions in English conversation that will help you answer these common questions or handle such topics of light conversation.
It is important to try to overcome the cultural awkwardness that you may feel at having to engage in these topics. Understand the speaker’s intentions: often it is just a way of showing friendliness and extending the greeting by a small degree beyond just saying “good morning”. The conversation that develops need not be long or divulge any details of genuine real interest. And in the context of weekend plans, this is often the case: we have nothing of particular interest to talk about. This is ok!
So in this post, we introduce some useful expressions of daily conversation that express a typical uneventful weekend.
(For simplicity, we focus on the Monday-morning scenario, putting everything into past form. Additionally, the phrasal components that make up each response can be used interchangeably with others in the list, for greater expressive flexibility.)
Common questions:
- What did you get up to at the weekend?
- Did you get up to anything special at the weekend?
- How was your weekend?
Common answers:
We didn’t do much. Just the usual; you know.
Not much, I’m afraid.
Actually, I caught up on sleep this weekend, after a very busy week.
We enjoyed a nice long lie-in, but not much else!
Actually, I spent a fair amount of time helping out with housework.
In actual fact, I spent most of the weekend in front of the TV.