Course: How to... Speak English / Unit 1 / Session 28 / Activity 1

William

Hello, and welcome to How To, the programme which tries to help with those very basic but very tricky areas of communication.

My name's William Kremer. Let me start today's programme by telling you an anecdote - a short story about something that happened to me.

When I was an English language teacher I once bumped into one of my students in the supermarket.

And we got talking about this and that and it was very nice: we carried on talking and talking and talking and after a while I quite wanted to stop talking, but my friend didn't pick up on my hints!

In the end, I had to say, 'Well I have to go now. Bye bye!' and walk away!

Now, ultimately this is how you end a conversation: you say, Goodbye, and walk away.

But before we do that we usually try to close a topic: we finish talking about a particular thing.

This shows our conversation partner that we're ready to say goodbye. But the way we do this is very subtle - it's hard to notice.

Yesterday, I got talking to my colleague Emily about a holiday she's taking soon.