The teammate who has not delivered for a week
Your final-year project team has a submission on Friday. One teammate has missed two internal deadlines and stopped answering the group. You have been doing their part on top of yours, and you are angry. You have caught them alone outside the lab. The easy moves — complaining to the guide, or saying nothing and doing the work — are both worse than the conversation you are about to have.
An intermediate-level session of about 8 minutes.
The worry is that raising it makes you the difficult one: that they will deny everything, the group will shrug, and you will still be doing both parts on Thursday night. So it gets postponed, and the anger comes out later in a message the whole group can read. Saying it face to face, before Friday, is harder and far better. Most of the preparation goes into the first thirty seconds, into an opening line about the module and the deadline that does not require them to be at fault. After that you are mostly listening, because the reason somebody stops answering a group is rarely the reason you have been assuming, and what you ask for at the end depends on it.
Angles worth taking
- Lead with the work and the deadline; the moment a sentence contains "you always", the conversation becomes about your tone.
- When the first answer is defensive, do not argue with it — ask what changed last week, which is a question they can actually answer.
- If something real surfaces, slow down there, because that is the only part that changes what happens before Friday.
- Mention that you have been covering their module once, as a fact; repeating it turns it into a grievance.
- Agree out loud who does which piece, then say it back, since vague agreement is how the same week repeats itself.
Who is in the room
You play
A student on the same project team, carrying the extra work
You speak with
A project teammate who is defensive at first, has a real reason they have not shared, and opens up only if approached without blame
Phrases to reach for
These are shown to you before the session starts. They are what you are asked to use, not a list the scorer is checking off.
Ready to speak?
Free to start. You need a TalkDrill account to speak — reading this page does not.
Browse all roleplay scenariosThe format
Modes
Learn (guided) · Mock (exam-real)
How a roleplay session works
Read your brief
Your role, the situation, and what a good outcome looks like. The counterpart has their own brief, and you do not get to read it.
Open the conversation
You speak first in most scenarios. How you open sets what you can ask for later, which is most of the exercise.
Handle the turn
Somewhere in the middle it stops going your way — a refusal, a counter-offer, a rebuttal you did not prepare for. That moment is the scenario.
Read the report
Outcome, the phrases you used and the ones you missed, fluency and clarity, and the specific line worth rewriting.
What you're scored on
Across every roleplay, the report looks at the same four things — because they are what makes a real conversation work or fail.
Raise it directly without accusing, find out what is actually going on, and leave with a specific commitment on who does what before Friday.
Task outcome
Whether you got what the brief asked for: the refund, the extension, the concession, the point conceded.
Appropriacy
Whether the register fits. A complaint that is too soft gets nothing; the same complaint too hard gets a manager and no refund.
Recovery
What you do with the unexpected turn — repair, rephrase, push back, or stall. This is where most of the marks move.
Delivery
Fluency, pronunciation and pace, judged in conversation rather than in a prepared monologue.
More roleplay scenarios
All roleplay scenarios · Placement scenarios · All speaking practice