While many classes or books are called business English, this is basically general English with business vocabulary and topics. Common textbooks include Market Leader and In Company. Business Roles has a number of good supplementary activities.
You don’t need to have a background in business to teach business English – you need to prepare yourself as you would for a general English lesson and be familiar with what you are teaching – but if you don’t know much more than that, that’s usually okay. Your students are the ones who presumably know about business – and having them explain in English, to you, is a realistic situation.
One Intermediate Market Leader lesson on Strategy, for example, includes a reading by a Cisco executive about the advantages and disadvantages of mergers. There is a short vocabulary section which includes terms like cost cutting, demerger, sell off, disposal, rationalisation, acquisition, and economy drive; the teachers’ book has a short explanation of each.
Many teachers report that there are differences in student motivation and attendance between general English classes and business or in-company classes. On the one hand, employees may be happy to get an hour off work to study English, on the other, if the company is paying for their lessons, they may not be quite as motivated as students who are shelling out their own hard-earned money. You may also be in a position to deal with social dynamics which are different from those typical of a group of students who don’t know each other; people may only want to work in pairs with certain other people or the boss may not want to volunteer an answer he isn’t sure about, especially if the secretary’s English is better than his.
Find some Resources for Business English here.
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Your article is quite interesting and accurate. Business English is a major growth area in the ESL world for one simple fact – Globalization. More and more companies are trying to spread themselves far and wide around the world and this takes people you can communicate effectively in English. However, one issue that needs to be addressed in the equation is performance. By this, I mean people who try to win new business or conduct any form of business in an L2 environment, need to be able to conduct business in English; not just speak in English. My dad can speak perfect English but he certainly couldn’t win business in any country, let alone a non-English speaking country. Students need to be trained to win business if this is their role. Just speaking in English is inadequate. A really good web site that discusses this issue is http://www.g7english.com. These people seem to be more professional in this whole area of BizEng.
Interesting comment – and site. It’s your site, no?
I agree with you in a sense, that simply speaking English isn’t going to make a business person successful in doing business…but I guess I wonder if there is one universal “method” of conducting international business that can be taught.
Maybe there is, I don’t know, I’m thinking that many business people might want to just learn English and then use their own intuition or training to decide how to conduct business in whatever other countries they operate in. I’d be hesitant to assume that someone with a lower English ability than they’d like necessarily needs help improving their professional skills.
I’d think it just depends on the motives of the individuals seeking courses.
They are tricky waters to navigate, when you start to mix or confuse business skills with EFL classes, and the hardest students are those that are just starting out in English. You’ll notice that many of the off-the-shelf ‘business English series generally start at an intermediate level or at best, pre-intermediate.
I’ve seen many a new TEFLer in Mexico City (in particular) decide that they are going to program such items as business ethics, proper office etiquette, business letter writing skills, etc for suc a business EFL type class, though they haven’t had the training themselves. The biggest mistake you can make as a TEFLer is to believe that you are teaching business and not English.
In response to Ian, I think it’s horribly presumptuous for a (most likely) western TEFL teacher to go in to a country believing they can teach proper business etiquette or processes. I believe the job is to help the student communicate effectively by providing the necessary vocabulary and language structure, not to influence the student’s professional behavior. Teaching business “performance” is beyond the scope of any language class. If a person is competent in his or her job, they will be competent in any language given the proper tools.
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