English for the workplace

Disintermediation, or cutting out the middleman

2012-02-03T18:51:00.000+01:00

“The publisher is amiddleman, he calls the tune to which the whole rest of the trade dances; andhe does so because he pays the piper.” Geoffrey Faber

At the last BESIG conference Paul Emmerson presented his latest book to the world. The difference to all his otherbooks? This one is self-published (see him being interviewed by Vicki Hollett here). Of course self-publishing doesn’t only meanbooks in paper format. Thousands of teachers are now publishing their materialsonline, ranging from some very sad efforts with dubious methodology and qualitycontrol, to some really impressive resources. And self-publishing is definitelybecoming easier than it used to be. Sites like CreateSpace and Lulu are becoming ever more popular. Earlier this year Apple announced their iBooks author software. And for ELT authors there is the round, which promises greatthings.

Why is self-publishing becomingattractive to even established ELT authors? Well, there seem to be lots ofreasons. First of all self-publishing is relatively easy – you don’t need to jumpthrough the hoops that most traditional publishers seem to require, the time tomarket is potentially very fast, and you get to keep a much larger percentageof the income. If you have identified a niche market this is especially true –I have earned far more money selling tailor made materials to corporatecustomers than I have ever made via the more traditional publishers.

Of course there are lots of advantages withworking with traditional publishers too. They tend to be much better atmarketing, although social media seem to be changing the rules ofthe game. They have much deeper pockets, which means if you want to do anythingfancy they can provide the initial capital. And quality control can be a lotmore rigorous. Having said that, the key advantage is probably that in many markets themainstream publishers have an established reputation; lots of teachers still preferto go with the known quantity rather than face the hassle of looking throughcountless websites in order to find something suitable. And as a writer myselfI can confirm that association with traditional publishers is useful – it’snice to be invited to talk at conferences, for example, and some clients maywork with you simply because you have published with a “big” name.

The point, of course, is that it is nolonger the publisher who pays the piper. There is now a choice, and thecompetition will force standards to improve. Let’s hope we all benefit.

A rose is a rose by any other name

2011-07-31T15:44:00.004+02:00

Have you noticed how many ESP coursebooks there are nowadays? All the major publishers seem to be rushing to fill the niche. But is there such a thing as an ESP coursebook? Or are publishers trying to pull a fast one?

Before I answer these questions I’d just like to take a few minutes to reflect on my own experiences using coursebooks in business English teaching and ESP.

When I first started teaching, in a language school, coursebooks were lifesavers. They taught me a lot about what I was teaching, kept the learners quiet when I needed to think about what I wanted to do next, and basically did the planning for me. They certainly saved me a lot of time. Sometimes I had exam classes, and these books seemed to tick all the boxes. When I was asked to take business English classes the books were excellent too – they never went in too deep into the real world of business, preferring to skate along the surface. But I was happy with this, and I think my students were too.

Later I started teaching full time in-company, and I soon realized that coursebooks I had been using were largely irrelevant to this new world I found myself in. The main problem was that they had no face validity – materials have to look right, and the topics the available books focused on and the language they practiced were miles away from what my learners wanted and needed. As James Schofield so aptly wrote,

“Why are business English books always so serious? This was the question that I kept being asked by students as they turned the page of their coursebook to find yet another earnest article about business ethics or company downsizing, culled from the business press and adapted for classroom use. And the practice exercises! Yes, my students needed to learn how to use the telephone, write emails, and handle the passive. But did it always have to be in the context of ordering pencils, arranging a visit to a factory, or describing how the photocopier worked? Wherever I looked, I nearly always found a sameness and blandness that made all the major coursebooks indistinguishable, with forgettable titles that morphed into a dull, pseudo-business blur.”

(from Double Dealing Intermediate Teacher’s Book, 2004, Summertown Publishing)

Yes, some activities worked, and some of the content was useful, but I never went through a coursebook from cover to cover as I might have done with my language school classes. This is where I learned to take materials from my students’ world and adapt it, something you can only really do when you get to know a company and have access to things like the intranet. I got to know products and clients. I spent hours in offices discussing workplace issues. I observed my students using English in “real” situations and analyzed problem areas. I developed simulations with department heads. The result was that my lessons became much more focused.

Later I became part of a team producing in-company materials for other teachers to use, and this was again another huge learning curve. When you write materials for yourself you know what you want, but when you are writing for other people you suddenly realize that there are so many other perspectives on what makes a good lesson, or how people best learn a language. You have to allow for other teachers’ teaching styles and experience. Things which I had taken for granted caused confusion among teachers who had different backgrounds. Of course, not knowing the students added yet another dimension. But I was lucky enough to be able to spend a lot of time doing needs analysis, watching meetings and observing where the difficulties lay, and trying to understand the different challenges students are faced with when they use English in the “real world”, so at least the materials were relevant. I also had the chance to observe other teachers in action, and see how they used the materials I had helped develop. And I began to appreciate more and more that the teachers and the learners are only part of the equation – there are so many other stakeholders whose needs have to be addressed – HR departments, management, clients and so on.

Later I started writing books for publishers, and this was another major eye-opener. I had thought, somewhat naively, that books with a name on the front meant that the author was responsible for the content. But the reality is quite different – there are a lot of people involved in producing books, from the author, to readers, to series editors to content editors to layout editors to publishers to sales staff to, well, you get the picture. All have different perspectives and viewpoints, and the result is inevitably a compromise. You have to please all of the people all of the time. The tension between pedagogic needs and commercial needs can be especially frustrating, with publishers always keen to sell as many books as possible. A classic example of this in the world of business English and ESP is that books almost always have to be written with both pre-experience and at work students in mind, even though the two groups have completely different needs. Such books appeal to a lot of teachers (they did to me once upon a time too), but they really cater for teachers who either don’t have the time to produce tailor-made materials, or are pre-experienced themselves and lack the know-how.

So is there such a thing as an ESP coursebook? What my own experience has shown me is that the answer to this question lies not in the coursebook itself, but in the teachers and the students. The book is merely a resource. What matters is what the book offers, not what it is called. If the book helps you deal with the needs and goals of the class then it is an ESP coursebook. If it doesn’t, then perhaps you shouldn’t be considering it at all.

Performance, authenticity and the language of doing

2011-05-29T08:59:00.001+02:00

Writing recently about learning in the workplace, Conrad Gottfredsen emphasizes the point of why we are in the classroom. It is all about improving performance.

“Preparing learners for the vital moment when they are called upon to perform should have always been at the heart of our efforts. This is when learners meet the realities of what they actually learned, what they didn’t learn, what they have forgotten, what they have misunderstood, the unanticipated nuances, and the challenge of a constantly changing performance landscape.”

Now clearly one of our main roles as teachers of business English and ESP is to help our learners perform better in their workplace. To do this we need to focus on the language they use at work, and one way we do this as teachers and trainers is to use activities like role-plays and simulations, which try to replicate workplace situations in the classroom. As I wrote in HTTBE,

“the aim is to create a particular kind of situation in the safety of the classroom, so that when the learner meets a similar situation in real life he or she can think, “I’ve already been here and done this” (p. 56).

Let’s look at a couple of situations that a typical group of learners might have to face, and examine how well we can simulate them in the classroom. Let’s assume that our learners are a group of automotive engineers, and that they need English to take part in meetings with customers. Occasionally they will have to stand up and give a short presentation in those meetings.

Simulating presentations in the classroom is relatively easy as long as we know the content and the audience. Business English teachers do this all the time. Meetings, however, are more difficult. The language in meetings is dynamic, messy and context-specific, and it is also co-constructed by the participants in the meeting, which means that it is very difficult to predict what language is going to emerge and what meanings it is going to carry. And any activity in the classroom which attempts to replicate the workplace will never replicate that workplace for everyone in the group. Some of our engineers will be able to simulate their real selves and their real tasks, but others will perforce have to play a role, in this case that of the customers.

But we do know that much of the language in the meeting will almost definitely have something to do with engineering. In addition, these engineers will not be talking about engineering, but doing the business of engineering. It is this language of “doing” that interests us, because this is the language our learners need to master. This is what is sometimes known as the “target discourse”. This sort of language doesn’t appear naturally in classes, because people aren’t doing their jobs when they in the classroom. So it is our job as teachers to make this language appear. And we do this by replicating the situation, and by providing judicious feedback.

Of course, this language of “doing” depends on the type of learners we have, and their objectives, and sometimes there will be little we can do except generalise. But with some groups, like our engineers, there are various things we can do to learn about it. For example, we can observe our learners, or people like our learners, in meetings. We can discuss the meetings with our learners and other stakeholders. We can watch what happens in classes, and use what we learn to inform the design of activities in other classes. We can read the research which is being done on the language of meetings. And so on. With such groups learning about the target discourse is not difficult, but we do have to work at it if we want it to appear in the classroom. It doesn’t somehow apparate in by itself.

Which brings me on to the subject of authenticity. Often authenticity is discussed in terms of texts (spoken or written), with authentic texts being those which are not designed for use in the language classroom. But this is a very narrow way of looking at authenticity, and it doesn’t really help us make decisions about how useful such texts are in the classroom. It is also a relatively static view of authenticity, because it prompts an either / or response to a text - either a text is authentic, or it isn’t.

Widdowson (1978) points out that authenticity can also be seen in terms of how a text is used, arguing that authentic texts are different to “genuine” texts, which are merely the original texts produced by the users.

“Genuineness is a characteristic of the passage itself and is an absolute quality. Authenticity is a characteristic of the relationship between the passage and the reader and it has to do with appropriate response.” (p. 80).

Bachman (1990), writing in the context of language testing, develops this idea further with his distinction between situational authenticity and interactional authenticity. Situational authenticity has to do with the types of tasks we ask our learners to do, and interactional authenticity refers to the language we ask them to use as they engage in the task. Clearly a good simulation will have both situational authenticity and interactional authenticity, but this is where things become even more problematic for language teachers, because real world tasks imply real world content knowledge. Our automotive engineers are using their technical expertise all the time when they are “doing” their jobs, and this doesn’t change when they switch to English. If we want to simulate target discourse we cannot simply separate it into language knowledge and content knowledge, and focus on one and not the other. We are talking about real world performance here, not just language competence. This sort of activity is not about teachers imposing a set of grammar rules or texts and asking learners to focus on aspects of language. Nor is it about giving the learners the chance to talk about their jobs. This is about creating the right environment so that the learners have a chance to work with the language they might use in their workplace.

So perhaps another way of looking at authenticity is simply to define it in terms of how close we get to the target language which our learners need. This takes both situational and interactional authenticity into account, because the target language can only appear in certain situations. In this sense the closer the classroom language is to the target discourse, the more authentic it is. Our class of automotive engineers explaining their jobs to each other is producing less authentic language than the same class of engineers debating the merits of a particular type of ball bearing. And those engineers explaining how their product can be delivered on time and to cost is more authentic still, assuming that is the target discourse we are trying to simulate.

In summary, if we want our learners to perform better in the workplace we need to give them the chance to practise in a world that is similar to that workplace. First of all we need to identify our learners’ key communicative situations, which in business inevitably mean the ones where poor performance affects the bottom line. If the automotive engineers in our class don’t manage to persuade their customers, the whole point of them being in the language training is mute. And when we design simulations we need to aim at both situational and interactional authenticity, which means also thinking about the professional knowledge that the learners bring to the simulation. To do this successfully we need to have some knowledge of what the target discourse looks like. Only in this way can we come close to authenticity in the classroom, which is how we replicate the language of "doing".

Bachman, L. F. (1990). Fundamental Considerations in Language Testing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Frendo, E. (2005). How to Teach Business English. Harlow: Longman.
Widdowson, H.G. (1978).Teaching Language as Communication. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Teaching Qualifications

2011-05-24T18:03:00.001+02:00

People often ask me what qualifications they might consider as business English / ESP teachers, so I thought I would list a few I know about. Please feel free to add more if you know of any. I have deliberately not included master degree level courses as almost every good TESOL / TEFL masters offers options in this area. The qualifications on this list are basically aimed at teachers who already have an initial teaching qualification, but are looking to become more knowledgeable about business English / ESP teaching.

LCCI First Certificate for Teachers of Business English (FTBE)

This certificate is described as “on demand”, and involves a 2 ½ hour exam. There is no requirement to do any preparation course, although many will find such a course beneficial. Simply contact an LCCI training centre in your area to find out when the exam is next available.

Trinity Certificate in International Business English Training (Cert IBET)

This certificate requires the candidate to receive a minimum of 50 hours input, which can be delivered in a number of ways, from full time intensive programmes to online and distance learning options. The candidate is also required to submit an assignment of between 3000 and 5000 words.

Communication and Language Trainer Certificate – Corporate (CLTC-C)

Candidates for this certificate are required to complete a series of modules in Cologne, Germany, before giving an assessed presentation, supported by a written rationale. The certificate is accredited by ICC International Language Network.

Cambridge ESOL Delta

The Delta was revised in 2008 and now includes a module which allows a candidate to specialise in a specific area such as ESP or business English teaching.

You know enough words!

2011-04-07T16:45:00.002+02:00

There’s a fascinating discussion at the moment about Fabio Capello’s 100 words vocabulary. For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s the quick summary. Fabio Capello is an Italian football trainer who manages the England national team. In a recent interview he was quoted as saying that he only needs 100 English words to be able to communicate with his players. In a later interview he clarified this, saying that he was only talking about technical words.

Now obviously the 100 word limit is not the issue here. What Capello was actually saying was that he has the words he needs to do the job. This strikes directly at the heart of what we do as ESP teachers, of course. It also has a lot to do with the English as a Lingua Franca debate. At what stage can we as teachers say “Ok, you’ve had enough – no more lessons for you – you know enough words. You can do the job”.

Let’s have a quick look at the “tools” we have as teachers and trainers to do this.

1. Gut feeling. We (or the learner) can decide that enough is enough.
2. Testing. We can use tests, either our own or commercial, to help us decide.
3. Survival. We can see if the person can actually do the job.
4. Others. We can ask other stakeholders eg customers, bosses, colleagues what they think.

We could argue that three of these fit the bill in Capello’s case – he clearly believes his English is good enough (Gut feeling), he has stayed in the job since 2007 (Survival), and he has had his contract extended to 2012, which presumably means that other stakeholders also believe he can do the job (Others).

Any thoughts?

A new level system?

2011-03-19T22:44:00.000+01:00

Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.

This comment about uniqueness, sometimes attributed to Margaret Mead, can easily be adapted to describe language.

Always remember that the words you use are absolutely unique. Just like the words everyone else uses.

A lot of what we say has been said before. In fact, if this was untrue we couldn’t be English teachers, because what we often do is actually teach people what to say in certain situations. Oh, you want to teach presentations? Well, here are some useful phrases. You want to persuade someone? No problem, let’s role play what you might say. You want to write a letter? Here is a model for you to use. And so on. We even have lists of the most common words and phrases which we use to produce teaching materials.

But knowing the words and knowing when and how to use them are not the same thing. Knowing the words is only the first part of the show. Our learners also have to learn how to perform.

And this means learning when to use the words, and above all, knowing how to be innovative with them, how to tweak them so that they do become unique. Creative language is powerful language. Tweaking can be anything, from the way they are pronounced to the way they are used. Like this week someone I know explained her job like this – “My job is just a mishmash of lots of different tasks.” I thought: “Wow, that is so accurate for so many people. Why don’t I ever teach that word? "Mishmash" is such a useful word in this context and so much more interesting than “I am responsible for …", and "I report to …””

Maybe we should have a new level system in ELT. Something like this:

Beginner – knows the words
Intermediate – knows when to use them
Advanced – knows how to tweak them

I think an important part of our job is to help our learners make their language personal and memorable, not typical and ordinary. The challenge, of course, is how to do this.

Don't apply for that training course!

2011-02-28T14:37:00.000+01:00

Last year I applied for a teaching job at a large multinational. As always, I sent in my references and copies of my certificates, and a few weeks later was told that I had been shortlisted and would be interviewed. However, when I got to the interview I was told (within a couple of minutes) that I was “overqualified” for the job. Thank you very much for coming. Goodbye!

Thankfully this has only happened to me a couple of times over the years. I remember the first time was just after I had finished my diploma in business English teaching. Proud of my new piece of paper, I applied for a job as a freelance trainer at a large corporation, and didn’t even get an interview. I knew some of the other people who had been given work, and I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t even been asked to meet the department head. It wasn’t until years later that a friend who worked in this company told me that I had been seen as a threat rather than a possible asset. The head of language training, who had no formal qualifications in teaching English herself, did not hire people who did. It was as simple as that.

Now don’t get me wrong. There are sometimes very good reasons why an employer might prefer to have someone less experienced or qualified. There may be some concern that the applicant might not find the job challenging enough. Or there may be salary issues. Or there may be a suspicion that the person is only looking for a temporary position until something better comes along. And of course some qualifications are not particularly relevant to teaching. A research degree like a PhD is not an “over-qualification” - it simply requires different skills and does not say much about a person’s ability to teach. So certainly there are questions that can and should be asked.

But is teaching really this sort of job? Is it possible to be overqualified as a teacher? Should experienced teachers always be pushed off into management jobs (for which they normally have absolutely no experience or training whatsoever)? If the answer to these questions is yes, then are we also arguing that we should place a limit on professional development?

Don’t apply for that training course – it might make you “overqualified”. Hmm.

The core of our work?

2011-01-28T20:06:00.001+01:00

Following on from my posts on this subject last year, here is a link to the recently published British Council- EAQUALS Core Inventory for General English. If you are not yet familiar with it I urge you to have a look.

I was interested in this project partly because I think it will help many teachers and publishers around the world. The authors describe it as “an attempt to answer the question put by many teachers over the years of what to teach at each CEFR level” (page 8). As I see it the inventory will inevitably become influential, particularly with the weight of the British Council and EAQUALS behind it, and will remain influential at least until the publication of the English Profile project. But I have to admit I do have some concerns about it.

“Not to tell teachers what to teach”

My first concern is that I am not really sure how the core inventory is really meant to be used. The authors of the document describe it as documentation of “current best practice” (page 11), whose “aim was not to tell teachers what to teach.”(page 18). So this inventory is not about what should be included in a syllabus in future, but what is being done now. This is a very important point. Yet we also read that it provides

“a practical inventory of language points that should be part of a balanced course at each level of the CEFR.” (page 3)

which to me seems to imply that if we want a “balanced course” we need to include it. Doesn't this sound like telling teachers what to teach? And later we are told that

“In any particular context, teachers and syllabus writers would add other language points to this minimal core, based upon an analysis of the needs and interests of the learners concerned.” (page 10)

The words “minimal core” suggest to me that the core inventory should be seen as somehow central to what happens in the classroom, with the specific needs of the learners an “add-on”. ESP practitioners do not normally see needs analysis in this way.

However, later in the document the authors seem to change the emphasis, arguing that:

“A consensus core is also, by definition, inadequate to meet the needs of any particular group of learners. It may give a point of reference, but an analysis of the needs of the learners in question should give the basis for actual teaching. ... Don't think you must teach everything that is in the inventory” (page 20).

This seems to make much more sense. Needs analysis is given priority. The inventory is not seen as a “minimal core” which “should be part of a balanced course”, but rather as something that “may give a point of reference,”... with “the needs of the learners ... the basis for actual teaching”.

But the message does seem to be a bit confused.

“Old favourites” repackaged?

My second, and perhaps more serious, point of concern is that the inventory is not based on up-to-date research on how language is actually used at each level, but rather on:

“A number of sources … including: an analysis of the language implied by CEFR descriptors, an analysis of content common to various CEFR-based language school syllabuses and popular coursebooks for English, and a teacher survey.” (page 10).

So, perhaps unsurprisingly, the grammar section includes long lists of old favourites, such as zero, first, second, third and mixed conditionals, even though we know that such language descriptions do not necessarily bear much resemblance to “real” language. (See Scott Thornbury’s discussion about “Grammar Mcnuggets”). And the long lists of exponents (pages 43-71) are quite traditional in nature, and seem to ignore the fact that so much language is at the discourse level - why no adjacency pairs, for example? Certainly the lists are meant to be “illustrative rather than exhaustive” (page 18), but is this really “current best practice”?

“A convenient tool ... to be used with care”

To be fair, the authors of the document do go out of their way to explain the limitations of the project. It “is intended as a reference work not as a practical tool” and “it may be a convenient tool, but it is to be used with care” (page 20). It is “selective, not comprehensive” (page 21). And despite my misgivings there are some very constructive ideas for teachers to think about (see the scenarios on pages 26-35, for example). I for one expect to be dipping into it a lot over the next few months and years. I am sure that for many of us it will become extremely useful.

But as I have tried to explain, I am a bit concerned about how the inventory might actually be used. Will it be used to “tell teachers what to teach”? Will publishers and course designers treat it as a “minimal core” or as a “point of reference”? And how accurate are the lists anyway? Do they really reflect core language use at each level, or are they simply “old favourites” repackaged?

One size fits all?

2011-01-22T12:57:00.000+01:00

A lot of us teach presentation skills. And a lot of us give presentations or watch other people giving them. We all have opinions about what makes a good or bad presentation.

I was watching someone teach presentation skills the other day. And I watched as they ground out the “rules” of a good presentation. You know the sort of thing: only use a font size of 24, only use a maximum of three bullet points, seven words per line, use pictures as much as possible, tell stories, and so on.

One of the rules this person trotted out was the old myth about how words only account for around 7% of the message, and how tone of voice and body language accounts for 93%. Mehrabian’s research, which is probably where these figures originally came from, never made general claims like this, but was looking at specific contexts. In fact, there has even been a campaign over recent years to try and rid the world of this particular myth – see this post on Olivia Mitchell’s excellent blog, for example.

The way I see it, a good presentation doesn’t depend on these sorts of things, but on whether or not the presenter gets his or her message over to the audience. And there are lots of different ways this can be done successfully – it depends totally on the situation, the presenter’s personality, the audience and so on. Font size depends on equipment available in the room, not on a “rule”. Pictures and beautifully designed slides are great, but most of the people I work with have to operate within the confines of corporate design, and don’t have the time or resources to prepare works of art. Anecdotes are appropriate for some audiences, but can be disastrous for others. Tone of voice and body language are important, but engineers trying to understand the intricacies of a new widget are probably focussed on the content, not the speaker.

For me the nail in the coffin came after the session, when the trainer said to me: “These people are so boring. And their content is so boring. That’s the problem with working with geeks.” But she had ignored what I think is the fundamental issue – her learners were dealing with content aimed at a particular community of practice, and not at providing an interesting talk for the trainer.

I guess it all comes back to needs analysis again, which is at the heart of ESP and business English training. One size does not fit all.

BELF 101

2011-01-10T13:40:00.007+01:00

Over the last couple of years BELF (Business English as a Lingua Franca) has been gaining prominence, with articles appearing in various publications. Last year the Journal of Business Communication devoted an entire issue to it. And Vicki Hollett has invited several prominent speakers to discuss the issue in the next BESIG webinar. What I would like to do in this post is to introduce the idea of BELF and discuss some its implications for us as teachers and trainers of business English.

First of all, what is ELF?

English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) has been around (and hotly debated) for a while now. (See the Wikipedia page for a useful list of references). Research by people like Jennifer Jenkins and Barbara Seidlhofer have worked on looking at various features, but there is still a lot of discussion about just how useful ELF is to teachers and trainers. For example, Jenkins (2007:3) says that “ELF emphasizes the role of English in communication between speakers from different L1s, ie the primary reason for learning English today.” On the other hand Swan (2009:81), argues that “In a pedagogic context, … there is little justification for its use: it is both redundant and confusing, and we would do better to avoid it.”

The crux of the issue seems to revolve around how we define ELF. For ELF researchers it seems to be a way of talking about how English is used between people who do not have English as their own native tongue. They are not suggesting that ELF is a specific variety of English, although there have been some attempts to try and describe its general characteristics, or “common core”. Indeed for some researchers (Firth, 2009; Jenkins, 2007) ELF is about a new attitude to English as a language – it should not be seen as a sort of incorrect or deficient type of English, which non native speakers (NNS) use in their communication with each other, but rather as a language in its own right. In ELF it is the end result that matters, not whether interactions contain “mistakes” when measured against some standard variety of English. The problem is that as teachers and trainers we have become used to providing a model (normally our own variety of English) for our learners to aim at – this is difficult with an ELF approach, where there is no easily identifiable model. As Seidlhofer points out, “spontaneous ELF communication always has an element of adhoc negotiation of relevant norms, because speakers’ systemic/linguistic and schematic/cultural backgrounds vary from case to case, by definition”(2006: 13).

And what about BELF?

To give you an idea of what some people think about BELF, here are some recent quotes from researchers who are active in the field. The words in bold are my own.

“BELF refers to English used as a neutral and shared communication code. BELF is neutral in the sense that none of the speakers can claim it as her/his mother tongue; it is shared in the sense that it is used for conducting business within the global business discourse community, whose members are BELF users and communicators in their own right – not non-native speakers or learners.” (Louhiala-Salminen, Charles & Kanraanranta, 2005: 403-404).

Rather than focusing on language proficiency … the findings of such research could then drive teaching and training materials to focus more efficiently on those areas that are likely to cause a problem.” (Gerritsen and Nickerson, 2009: 188).

“BELF … implies a starting point where the code of communication is investigated in its own right, not as “English” in the traditional sense of the word.” (Rogerson-Revell and Salminon, 2010: 276).

“Our findings suggest that English in today’s global business environment is “simply work” and its use is highly contextual. Thus, knowledge of the specific business context, the particular genres used in the particular business area, and overall business communication strategies are tightly intertwined with proficiency in English, which impacts upon teaching." (Kankaanranta and Louhiala-Salminen, 2010 :204).

"For our conceptualization of BELF, the “B” is of utmost importance." (Kankaanranta and Louhiala-Salminen, 2010 : 205).

“ … the concept of language competence, which has traditionally been gauged against the yardstick of a native speaker’s skills, has to be reevaluated in the light of recent (B)ELF research.” (Ehrenreich, 2010: 410).

"BELF competence calls for clarity and accuracy of content (rather than linguistic correctness) and knowledge of business-specific vocabulary and genre conventions (rather than only “general” English). In addition, because BELF interactions take place with nonnative speakers (NNSs) from a variety of cultural backgrounds, the relational orientation is perceived as integral for BELF competence." (Kankaanranta and Planken, 2010 : 380).

It seems to me that BELF is very much about adapting English to specific contexts and specific users so that the business is successful. If we look at business English an a continuum, then at one end we have what might be called “General Business English”, where we do not know very much about the target context, or where learners have less defined aims, and at the other end we have BELF, which is a quite specific use of language which depends on the context and the speakers. The key is that this specific use of English can only be measured against its own rules for successful communication, not against a “norm” imposed by outsiders. As Hanford (2010: 145) argues, “the most important issue in business is not language ability, but the experience and ability to dynamically manoeuvre within the communities of practice which business people inhabit.”

What does it mean to us as trainers?

I think the answer to this lies in our learners – what is it that they actually want from us? Is our primary role to help our learners learn English in the traditional sense, or is it to help them communicate in their business context? Clearly one of our tasks is to help our learners decide what is appropriate in any given context, and what isn’t, but this is too simplistic. For me BELF research suggests a pedagogic approach which has:

1 A much greater emphasis on needs analysis. People who use BELF work in very specific contexts and use very specific lexis, genres etc. Understanding this is key.

2 More listening to / analyzing of real BELF conversations, ideally with the learner as one of the interlocutors.

3 Materials which focus on relevant spoken genres (eg meetings, small talk) and written genres (eg emails / contracts etc), and not interviews or articles from newspapers and the internet. And content which resembles BELF interaction, not native speaker (NS) interaction, and is based on BELF corpora, not NS.

4 Tasks which do not focus so much on lexis and structures and more on why particular interactions are effective or ineffective, and strategies to deal with such situations.

5 Less focus on the trainer as the provider of the “model” and the arbiter as to what might be successful communication, and more focus on input from the target community of practice and other BELF users.

6 Tests which do not focus on form but on effectiveness.

Seidlhofer, Breiteneder, and Pitzl (2006) finish their discussion on ELF in Europe and the associated challenges for applied linguistics with this comment:

“Uncoupling any language from its native speakers is, of course, a challenging idea that will require a considerable effort of adjustment of attitudes and long-established concepts of just what a language is.”

Perhaps this is the crux of what BELF is really about. Looking forward to a great discussion at the BESIG webinar. See you there!

References

Ehrenreich, S. (2010). English as a Business Lingua Franca in a German Multinational Corporation: Meeting the Challenge. Journal of Business Communication, 47(4), 409-431.

Firth, A. (2009). The lingua franca factor. Intercultural Pragmatics, 6(2),147-170.

Gerritsen, M., & Nickerson, C. (2009). BELF: Business English as a Lingua Franca. In F. Bargiela-Chiappini (Ed.). The Handbook of Business Discourse (pp. 180 – 191). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Hanford, M. (2010). The Language of Business Meetings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jenkins, J. (2007). English as a Lingua Franca: Attitude and Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kankaanranta, A., & Louhiala-Salminen, L. (2010). “English? – Oh, it’s just work!”: A study of BELF users’ perceptions. English for Specific Purposes, 29, 204–209.

Kankaanranta, A., & Planken, B. (2010). BELF competence as business knowledge of internationally operating business professionals. Journal of Business Communication, 47(4), 380-407.

Louhiala-Salminen, L., Charles, M., & Kankaanranta; A. (2005). English as a lingua franca in Nordic corporate mergers: Two case companies. English for Specific Purposes, 24, 401–421.

Rogerson-Revell, P., & Louhiala-Salminen, L. (2010). An Introduction to Language Matters Part 2. Journal of Business Communication, 47(4), 375-379.

Seidlhofer, B., Breiteneder, A, & Pitzl, M-L. (2006). English as a Lingua Franca in Europe: Challenges for Applied Linguistics. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 26, 3–34.

Swan, M. (2009). English as a Lingua Franca: A Corpus-based Analysis. [Review of the book English as a Lingua Franca: A Corpus-based Analysis, by Prodromou, L.]. English Language Teaching Journal, 63(1), 78-81.

Business English, ESP, and Dogme

2010-11-30T19:35:00.000+01:00

Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others. (Groucho Marx)

My last post was a tongue in cheek critique of Dogme principles. Of course it was exaggerated, as is the nature of these things, but it was very interesting to see how passionate some of the responses were. What I would like to do in this post is explain in a bit more detail why I am not wholly convinced by Dogme.

On course books and other materials

First of all, just to set the record straight, I am not a big fan of course books. As it happens I personally very rarely use course books because they do not really fit the sorts of training I do in companies – one or two day seminars focussing on very specific needs. But I also spend a lot of time watching other trainers and teachers working, and I can see that course books work very well in some contexts. Now I am very well aware that Dogme has changed its position over the years, so that course books are not vilified as they once were. The “vow of chastity” has long gone. Nevertheless Dogme still argues that materials-light is the way to go. The problem is that business English and ESP can be incredibly materials-heavy. I remember my classroom in a factory in the mid-nineties, where I worked as a full time in-house trainer. The walls were covered with posters showing all the parts of the machines the factory made. The cupboards were full of materials based on authentic documents ranging from contracts to detailed specifications and complex correspondence. A lot of it consisted of role-plays and simulations which had been written after observing real meetings and negotiations with clients, and an analysis of where the critical communication problems were. This is not the same as asking the learners to bring in stuff from their workplace for a lesson – these materials had taken hours to design and produce, and were specifically designed to target the language these people needed for their jobs. The idea that “The learners are your primary resource” (Meddings & Thornbury (2009), p. 24), or “Put simply, the learners provide the texts” (p. 90) seems to me to be a little naïve. ESP in this sort of context is not about popping into the internet and using materials which are vaguely related to the topic – it is about working with and understanding the discourse the students need to operate in. Other members of the discourse community are the key resource, not the learners or the teacher. It’s about the intranet, not the internet. To be fair, Meddings and Thornbury (2009) acknowledge this, saying

“there is a real risk in a Dogme approach of allowing a conversational style to predominate, at the expense of engaging with the more formal registers … the Dogme teacher of ESP is faced with the challenge of how to balance the need to use texts with the philosophy of “bare essentials” ” (p. 90).

I agree. There is a real risk, and a very real challenge.

Having said all that, there are times when published materials may be the best solution. Let me give you an example. I have spent quite a lot of time working in large multinationals, with huge language training programmes. Often the teachers for these programmes are not internal – they come from a local language school or they are freelance. Experienced and well trained teachers are not guaranteed.

A strict Dogme approach, at least as I understand it, would suggest that all these teachers should be let free to do their thing in each classroom, and not have everything imposed from the outside. But this is very dangerous in a corporate environment. Dogme’s prioritisation of “the individual over the crowd” (Meddings & Thornbury (2009), p. 21) seems to ignore the other stakeholders in the equation - in corporate training it is about the corporate needs, not the individual’s. Often the company is paying for the training, and has identified certain competencies that they see as being important to the training intervention. Is their perspective not important or relevant too? Added to this, in such large scale corporate contexts it is very difficult to argue convincingly for a multi-million dollar training package which does not have clear and identifiable aims and objectives. It would take a very brave HR manager to justify a training intervention without these. So the company is really only left with two options – it can provide tailor made materials, which is extremely expensive, and only really justifiable in certain situations, or it can use off the shelf published materials, and offer guidelines as to their use, with some supplementary materials depending on the budget and the group composition. At least that way there is some accountability and quality control. Which would you choose if you were the HR manager? Dogme? Or course books?

On emergent language

Secondly, I am not entirely won over by the emergent language argument. In ESP the teacher is rarely a member of the target discourse community, and neither are the students – that is why they are there. So the idea that the target discourse can somehow emerge from the students in such a context is problematic for me. You need other stuff. This was always one of the strongest arguments for PPP methodology – how can learners learn new language if no-one in the class presents it first? At some point there has to be input. In TENOR (Teaching English for No Obvious Reason) this is not really a problem – the teacher is a full member of the target discourse community, and can act as the main resource. In business English and ESP this is rarely the case. The aim is not to establish a “local discourse community” (Meddings & Thornbury (2009), p. 12), or a “local community of practice (p. 91). The aim is to expose students to a target discourse community, and help them become members of that community.

While we are on the subject of emergent language, I have to say that I am fascinated by some of the work being done in the area of ELT and complexity theory, which Meddings and Thornbury (2009) touch on (p. 19). (I even wrote a foreword this year for a book on fractals in ELT (Claypole, 2010)). Larsen-Freemen and Cameron (2009) suggest that a “complexity theory perspective views language as a dynamic system which emerges and self organizes from frequently occurring patterns of language use.” (p. 111). Now it is true that the whole idea of language and emergence is exciting, and needs further research. But I am not sure there is enough evidence to make it a fundamental principle on which to base an approach to language teaching. Depending on your epistemological viewpoint, there is evidence which suggests that there are other ways of learning. Of course we can learn a language from interaction and conversation, but what about other tried and tested methods? My point is that it is not at all obvious that emergent language is the model we should all be following.

On vagueness and accountability

My third point is that Dogme is still evolving, which makes it very slippery to pin down. Meddings and Thornbury (2009), talk about Dogme moments (p. 21). Well, what happens in the non-Dogme moments? Is it OK to ignore the principles some of the time? If so, then why have principles if you can ignore them? Difficulties with the name “Dogme” have meant that the brand name has already been changed once. “Teaching Unplugged” is much better, of course, and Dogme 2.0 seems to be one of the latest manifestations.

This vagueness can make it very difficult for Dogme to meet the needs of a corporation. In large corporations it is normal for needs (at the strategic level) to be identified and targeted. Huge sums may be allocated to providing suitable training. The main costs of this training is not for the trainer or the materials, it is for things like opportunity and interference costs. Managers making these sorts of decisions need to be confident that there will be a return on the investment. This is difficult with Dogme, which seems to advocate a focus on the learner (not the company), a potentially loose syllabus (language will emerge from conversation), an emphasis on materials-light classrooms (where is the input coming from if the learners and the teachers don’t know it), limited evaluation and accountability (how do you ascertain whether or not your objectives have been met) and so on. And the fact that Dogme is still evolving and maturing also means that many teachers are still not quite sure what it stands for – it keeps changing its stance. This is not to say Dogme doesn’t have at least partial answers to key issues, but they are not easy to fit into a corporate environment where accountability is all. Note that I am not talking about the individual teacher and the learners in the classroom, where Dogme principles may be relatively easy to apply. I am talking about decisions which involve hundreds of trainers and thousands of learners. If a training provider wants to use Dogme in such an environment there is a very real risk that the client’s corporate needs might end up taking second place.

To conclude

Meddings & Thornbury (2009) are very careful to stress that Dogme is not dogma (p. 21). As we have seen, it is OK to have a mixture of Dogme moments and non-Dogme moments – but isn’t that what we have always done? Dogme is a statement about how we “view being a teacher”. (Meddings & Thornbury (2009), back cover). In this respect it does some marvellous work – it raises some of the key questions which need to be raised. But what we choose to emphasize in any specific teaching context does not depend on Dogme principles, or having a Dogme attitude, but on doing what is necessary for our clients. We already have a toolkit of approaches and attitudes we can adapt to suit the occasion. Lots of the things I do in a classroom could be described as following a Dogme approach, but I prefer to call these techniques by their original names. So I use framework materials, not materials-light teaching. I use words like needs analysis, learner centeredness, negotiation of meaning, and scaffolding when I need them - I do not need to place them in a Dogme framework. Why should I use new terms when the old ones work perfectly well?

So do we need Dogme? I am not convinced. We simply do not know enough about how languages are learned to confine ourselves to ten principles (Meddings & Thornbury (2009), p. 8) or three “axiomatic” principles (Meddings & Thornbury (2009), p. 21). I prefer to dip in and take what I need, just as I have always done, from a wider variety of sources. Why should I restrict myself to Dogme?

References

Claypole, M. (2010). The Fractal Approach to Teaching English as a Foreign Language: Dynamism and Change in ELT. Norderstedt: Linguabooks.

Larsen-Freeman, D., & Cameron, L. (2008). Complex Systems and Applied Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Meddings, L., & Thornbury, S. (2009). Teaching Unplugged: Dogme in English Language Teaching. Peaslake: Delta Publishing.

Thornbury, S. (2000). A Dogma for EFL. IATEFL Issues 153.

An overheard conversation

2010-11-23T15:12:00.002+01:00

I was walking past the HR manager’s office the other day, and I overheard what sounded like an interesting conversation. Luckily I had my digital recorder with me, so I dashed in, asked them to quickly sign a consent form, dashed out to minimize my observer’s paradox, and pressed record. Here is the transcript:

HR: Who was that?
Visitor: That was Evan Frendo. He’s the co-author of (hushed tones) Double Dealing!
HR: Ah. (pause, 0.75 seconds) What’s he doing here?
Visitor: He’s your English trainer.
HR: Ah, yes. I thought I recognised him. (pause, 0.85 seconds) Anyway, tell me more about your idea. Something to do with filming you said? And the learners are doing their own thing in the training room. What are they doing exactly?
Visitor: Well, that’s the thing you see. No-one really knows beforehand. The language emerges.
HR: Just like that?
Visitor: Yep!
HR: And you know this (pause 1 second) how?
Visitor: Oh, it's all in a book. (pause, 0,5 seconds) and the internet of course.
HR: I see. (pause, 0.85 seconds) Tell me about your teaching materials. Are they expensive?
Visitor: Well, there aren’t really any materials. So it’s not expensive.
HR: I see. Ok. Tell me about the teachers.
Visitor: Oh, don’t worry. Most of them have already done a four week introductory course on how to teach, so they know what they’re doing.
HR: But they’re in a hotel with their group for a week. That’s eight hours a day of training time, plus three meals. And a social programme in the evenings. What are they actually going to do?
Visitor: Again, no need to worry. Our teachers are very good at using the students as the main resource. They’ll find things to talk about. It works much better if the groups create the content themselves.
HR: But we want them to do email writing. And we’re paying for the course.
Visitor: Yes, well, talking is better for learning you see.
HR: I see. And exactly what are they going to be able to do at the end of the course?
Visitor: Well, speak English better, obviously! But not really sure what, exactly.
HR: So will they be able to negotiate with our overseas customers? All those specialist contract words?
Visitor: Yes, certainly. They will teach each other. And the teacher will help. We call this co-construction and scaffolding.
HR: Sounds like a building site. (pause, 0.5 seconds) But none of them have ever been overseas. And they’re all new in the company, so none of them know the contract words. And all those complicated clauses. Isn’t it the teacher’s job to teach them the appropriate thing to say?
Visitor: Well, yes, and no. Our teachers are trained to be helpful, so I don’t see any problems with contracts. And anyway, it's probably better to debate how contracts contribute to the ruination of society. Don't you think your employees should be encouraged to make up their own minds about these sorts of things?
HR: I see. Will there be a test at the end, or any sort of formal evaluation?
Visitor: No, no, of course not. That would create what we call backwash, which might be a bad influence. And since we don’t really have a syllabus, we wouldn’t know what to test anyway.
HR: I see. One moment. I need to speak to my secretary.
(buzzing noise, secretary enters the room, sound of heels clicking across the marble floor, pause of 1.25 seconds)
HR: Ah, secretary person. Please be so good as to douse this person in petrol, set fire to him, throw him out of the window, and then shoot at him with this pistol. Thank you.
Secretary: So, to clarify, you want me to shoot him down in flames?
HR: Yes, please. Immediately!

And then my battery ran out. Hmm, I wish I knew what they were talking about …

Follow-up post here.

Friends, BESIG members, dogme enthusiasts, lend me your ears

2010-11-21T22:02:00.000+01:00

The annual BESIG conference has just finished. As always, a great event, which gets better every year.

This year one of the things I did was take part in a panel discussion / debate called "How will we be teaching?" Pete Sharma did a great job presenting the technology position, Candy Van Ost argued convincingly for dogme, and I did my best to "defend" course books. Petra Pointner facilitated with her trademark professionalism and charm.

The first thing Pete did was remind everyone that it actually depends on the context - sometimes a course book works well, sometimes a dogmne approach is more appropriate, and sometimes technology makes the whole thing very easy. Taking an extremist position on any of these issues does not serve anyone's interests, least of all the learners. The result was a well balanced discussion which everyone, panel and audience alike, contributed to. None of the arguments were new, reflecting recent discussions across the blogosphere - see for example C is for Coursebook (by Linsay Clandfield) on Scott Thornbury's A-Z is for ELT, and No Dogma for EFL – away from a pedagogy of essential bareness on Jeremy Harmer's blog.

We also had a bit of fun. Here, for example, was part of my defence of course books: (Note that Pete didn't actually say any of the things I claim he did - lots of poetic license here. Also, apologies to the bard.)

Friends, BESIG members, dogme enthusiasts,
Lend me your ears.
I come to bury course books, not to praise them;
The bad exercises that authors write live after them,
The good are oft interred with their bones,
So let it be with course books ...
The noble Pete hath told you course books are boring:
If it is so, it is a grievous fault,
And grievously have course books answered it ...
Here, under leave of Pete and the rest,
(For Pete is an honourable BESIG member;
So are they all; all honourable members)
Come I to speak in this great debate ...

Course books were my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Pete says they are crap;
And Pete is an honourable BESIG member….
Coursebooks hath brought many students to my classes,
Whose fees did the general coffers fill:
Did this in course books seem unhelpful?
When that the teacher has cried, course books have opened:
Learners should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Pete says they are inflexible;
And Pete is an honourable BESIG member.
You all did see that on the exhibition stands
The publishers presented many wonderful products,
Which teachers did oft refuse: is this sensible?
Yet Pete says course books are old fashioned;
And, sure, he is an honourable BESIG member.

I speak not to disprove what Pete spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love course books once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then to mourn for them?
O judgement! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And BESIG members have lost their reason…. Bear with me;
My heart is in the bin there with the course books,
And I must pause till it come back to me.

IATEFL BESIG Conference - online programme

2010-11-11T19:16:00.001+01:00

Click here for more information.

On teaching the language of meetings

2010-10-21T20:30:00.004+02:00

There is no doubt that meetings play an important role in the workplace, and this is reflected by the number of times our students tell us that they need English for meetings. As trainers we nod sagely, and tick “meetings” on our needs analysis questionnaire. Yet I often wonder how good we really are at helping our learners function better in meetings. The formulaic language and nice clean dialogues in course books certainly have their place as teaching tools, but however well researched, they are never going to provide all of what our learners need because they are not designed to - real meetings are dynamic and messy, the learners’ context is missing, and learners’ individual needs have not been analysed by the course book writer.

Of course we all know that there is some excellent research out there which is just beginning to show just how complex teaching the language of meetings actually is, but it is up to us as trainers on the spot to make the key pedagogical decisions which will help our learners. And one of the big problems is that we ourselves are not members of the discourse communities which our learners are trying to become full members of. For example, we just don't know what is really acceptable or standard practice in terms of functions like interrupting, complaining, or using expletives. It’s a bit like teaching someone to drive a truck, but only ever having driven a car ourselves; we may have read the manual, but we have never actually done it.

Yet clearly there is a lot we can do as ESP practitioners / business English trainers. Here is a starting list – do feel free to add to it.

1 Become familiar with the research (see suggested initial reading list below).
2 Include activities which help you understand your learners’ meetings (types and functions, participants’ roles and relationships, power and status, and so on).
3 Get learners to actively reflect on their meetings (eg what went well? what didn’t go well? why didn’t it go well?). Part of our job is to help our learners become more aware of where the problems are. (Anecdote circles are a useful technique for this)
4 Remember the importance of relationships and relational language – meetings are about people as well as about things.
5 Understand that there is always an intercultural element, which may add to miscommunication and misunderstanding. It is not only about language.
6 Use authentic recordings of real meetings or of simulated (classroom) meetings. Focus not only on traditional things like lexis and grammar, but also on things like hedging, vague language, and use of figurative language.
7 If possible use video. Communication is multimodal: language is only one element.
8 Reformulation and recycling are powerful learning tools, so use them. Do not assume that feedback is enough. There is nothing wrong with repeating a role-play or simulation if learners need to practise the language.

Reading suggestions

There are hundreds of book and articles which are relevant to this topic – here are three of my favourites:

Kotthoff, H. & Spencer-Oatey, H. (Eds.). (2009). Handbook of Intercultural Communication. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Handford, M. (2010). The Language of Business Meetings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Holmes, J. & Stubbe, M. (2003). Power and Politeness in the Workplace. Harlow: Pearson.

But we have a contract!

2010-10-07T22:13:00.000+02:00

Last week IATEFL's BESIG (Business English Special Interest Group) ran a webinar on Intercultural communication in business and the classroom. The four speakers (including yours truly) were:

Baoquan Liu: Assessing Intercultural Business Communicative Competence
Evan Frendo: But we have a contract!
Sabrina Gerland: Teaching culture with a pragmatics approach
Peter Franklin: Mindfulness - and what else it takes to ‘do’ intercultural business communication

My own talk focussed on the subject of contracts in the business English classroom. Many of the people we teach have to deal with contracts in English, and the language of contracts is a common topic in business English teaching. The problem is that teaching the language is often not enough - different cultures have different perspectives on the role and function of contracts, and our learners need to be able to deal with this aspect too. In my talk I discussed some of these perspectives, and suggested ways that teachers can incorporate them into language training.

You can access the talks here.

This was my first webinar as a speaker, and I must say it took some getting used to. I suspect like other presenters I normally use feedback from my audience to adjust what I am saying - with a webinar this is not possible - it's just you and the webcam. So it's quite a different experience, and one I suspect we will all need to get used to over the next few years.

Small talk? Or business talk?

2010-08-17T18:25:00.003+02:00

I recently recorded a negotiation which took place in a company where I teach. In this extract two of the participants meet for the first time. They have just shaken hands and swapped business cards.

A So you have been working in Italy?
B I live in Italy but I work in various places. In Italy. Outside Italy. This weekend I was in Switzerland.
A Oh. [pause] Friends in Hong Kong. They mentioned you. You have never been to Hong Kong right?
B Erm yes I have been a few times. Yes. Yea.
A How about Beijing?
B I’ve been to Beijing two or three times ye I’ve been to trade fairs in Beijing.
A Uh-huh
B I think [name of trade fair] was in Beijing a couple of years ago.
A Oh really.
B Yea. And I’ve been up to up to Jilin province. Jilin province? You know Jilin province?
A In the North East of China.
B That’s right. Yes. In erm a place called Changchun.
A Changchun. I know the city. I know Changchun city. It’s very cold.
B It was freezing when I went yes. (laughs)
A In the winter right?
B Yes I was there in the winter. And in the summer. And yes I’ve been to Shanghai a couple of times. Yes I like China. [pause] But, erm, are you are you in Beijing? Or in Canada? Or do you move between the two? Or …?
A Er actually I was born in Beijing.
B Ok.
A And then I moved to Canada. Er twenty years ago.
B Ok.
A And er now my home is in Vancouver.
B Oh right.
A The Western part of Canada.
B Yes, yes.

This sort of conversation is sometimes called “small talk”. It appears to have nothing to do with the specific goals of the negotiation, and the two interlocutors are simply getting to know each other. Yet this small talk clearly has a purpose – notice how both quite openly ask for information about the other person’s background and experience, even though they hardly know each other. And what is interesting is that both appear happy to give information, and in fact both offer more than was asked for. This is all part of the need to find out as much as possible about the other person at the early stages of a relationship, but also to build the credibility and trust necessary to sustain that relationship (see my post on impression management here).

I’m always fascinated by small talk like this – it is so much more than simply talking about “safe” topics like the weather in order to fill the silence. Here are some of the features I found interesting in this particular extract.

• The way A initiates the conversation, and points out that he already has done some research (“Friends in Hong Kong. They mentioned you.”). You should know that A is the buyer, and B is the seller. I wonder if this is why A seems to take control of the conversation so easily.

• The way B slips in a compliment, or at least makes a positive (face-building) comment about A’s country, even at this early stage in the relationship. “I like China.”

• The way each interlocutor introduces or changes the topic: “So you have been ..”. / [pause] But, erm, are you are you in Beijing? This is a skill our learners often need to develop.

• The way the two interlocutors look for and find common ground – “It’s very cold.” “It was freezing when I went there …”.

If you are interested in exploring this topic further, here is a short article I wrote in 2006 which explores the topic of teaching small talk in a business English class, and makes suggestions for further reading.

Need an answer?

2010-08-11T15:02:00.000+02:00

Ever searched for an answer to a question on an internet search engine, and got pointed to a list of sites that almost help, but don't quite give you what you are looking for? Where was that article I read about needs analysis? What course book can I use to teach construction workers? Where can I learn more about LSP testing? And so on. Can be very frustrating, especially if you're pushed for time. I don't know about you, but when I search for something I find it oh so easy to get distracted.

Luckily there is another way to get information.

Are you familiar with Stack Exchange? If not, have a quick look at the entry in Wikipedia here. I think it's a great way for professionals to share information fast and efficiently. Someone out there will know the answer to your question. The problem is finding that "someone".

I have just proposed a new site called "Language for Specific Purposes (LSP)". You can visit it here. Please feel free to join in. And do tell your colleagues - the more of us involved the better for all.

Stack Exchange works really well in so many other professions. Hopefully we can get it working in ours too.

One day in the life of ...

2010-08-06T11:24:00.002+02:00

The more I work in this industry of ours the more I realize how widespread and heterogeneous it is. There are thousands of ESP and business English practitioners worldwide. Some work alone, others are employees of huge organisations. Some have very solid teaching backgrounds, others have deep roots in other professions. Some travel the world, others stay in one place. Some teach all day, others simply write. Some work in testing, others in marketing. The list goes on.

So I decided to start a new blog which offers glimpses into this world of business English and ESP. The people who write on it are all practitioners who are happy to tell us about a day in their lives. The first three posts are from Ilangovan Padmanaban, Cindy Hauert and Beena Menon. Thank you all so much for your generosity in sharing your days with us.

And if you work in this field, why not write about a day in your life? The more the merrier. Just send me an email.

On impression management

2010-07-25T14:17:00.002+02:00

"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players (As you like it, Act 2)"

Impression management (IM) is about how we seek to convey the best impression possible when we interact with other people. It is important to look good and sound good. This is clearly an important business skill, particularly at the early stages of a relationship. Typically we do this by "embellishing" our role or contribution, by explaining how we cleverly did something which saved the day, by showing how "stupid" other people are, by praising and complimenting where possible, and so on. IM tactics such as self promotion and ingratiation are common in the workplace (see this study by Opp Ltd) and in interviews (see, for example, Ellis et al.).

Nguyen et al look at self promotion and ingratiation within the context of team work and offer a useful breakdown, as follows:

Self-promotion scale

1. Talk to other team members proudly about your experience or education.
2. Make other team members aware of your talents or qualifications.
3. Let other team members know that you are valuable to the organization.
4. Make other team members aware of your accomplishments.

Ingratiation scale

1. Compliment your team members so they will see you as likeable.
2. Take an interest in your team members’ personal lives to show them that you are
friendly.
3. Praise your team members for their accomplishments so they will consider you a
nice person.
4. Do personal favors for your team members to show them that you are friendly.

If we agree that such tactics (techniques?) are useful for our business English learners, then we need to practise the relevant language in the classroom. The difficulty is to make sure that the IM techniques we teach are appropriate to the context and target needs of the learners. With some cultures a subtle approach may be necessary, with others a more overt one might be preferred. We do not want our learners to sound phony or manipulative when they use English in the "real world".

Here are some possible activities you might like to try out with your own learners:

1 Discuss the issue of IM, and ask your learners to brainstorm tactics. Compare the list to the one produced by Nguyen et al (above).

2 Ask your learners to tell stories and anecdotes about their work. Feedback could include a discussion about how useful the anecdotes were in terms of IM.

3 Encourage your learners to use appropriate IM language during role-plays and simulations.

4 Next time your class watches or listens to an interview with a business person, or does some activity to practise small talk, get them to analyse it from an IM perspective.

Update on "a core curriculum"

2010-07-21T22:59:00.001+02:00

Readers of this blog may remember my post on the core curriculum last April - the British Council and EAQUALS have now published an extract from the full version which is due to be published at the end of 2010. This is probably most of interest to those of us working in ESP course design or publishing because of its links to the CEFR, which means that it will probably influence the way we do things in future. You can download a leaflet here.

Seven words to define ESP and business English

2010-07-19T18:16:00.001+02:00

"When I use a word", Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less" (Through the Looking Glass, Chapter 6)

ESP and business English are quite difficult terms to define. Sure, we all know that ESP stands for English for Specific Purposes, and that as such, its main defining feature is that the learners have specific objectives, or need to learn English for use in a specific context. And business English is, well, the English used in business contexts. But how specific is "specific"? And what is "business"? What exactly do we mean by "needs"? Do ESP and business English refer to some sort of special language, or do they also refer to ways of teaching and learning (see Hutchinson and Waters (1987) English for Specific Purposes). And so on. Teachers all over the world might interpret and answer these questions in quite different ways, yet all would claim to work in ESP or business English.

At a recent teacher training course I asked trainees to brainstorm words which could be used to define ESP and business English (other than "needs"). They were only allowed seven words. This is what they came up with:

Unique. If a course is based on the needs of its participants then it must be the only one of its kind.

Expectations. Not all needs and wants can be identified, never mind met. Learners and teachers must be realistic in what can be achieved.

Collaboration. The teacher is not necessarily the only specialist in the room.

Relevance. Learners should be learning something applicable to their own real world contexts.

Compromise. Different stakeholders have different needs and priorities, so there will always be some give and take.

Face validity. If a course claims to be teaching ESP or business English, then the learners must be satisifed this is what is happening. The reasons for doing certain tasks and activities might not always be obvious to learners.

Gap. The whole point about an ESP course is that it aims to close the gap between where the learners are now, and where they want or need to be in the future.

Which seven words would you choose?

Business English teachers – Getting through those interviews

2010-06-30T10:10:00.001+02:00

Just did a guest blog for OUP ELT Global Blog - basically a corporate perspective on trainer job interviews, with some sample questions. If you're looking for one of those nice jobs as an in-house trainer this might be useful. Looking forward to any comments you may have :-)

IATEFL BESIG on twitter - daily update

2010-06-11T10:12:00.000+02:00

Just wanted to help tell the world about IATEFL BESIG's new initiative in the social media world - if you would like to see a daily update of what the hot business English twitter topics of the day are, just click here. Very easy to contribute too - just use #BESIG in your tweets. Nice job, Carl :-)

On critical

2010-06-07T17:24:00.000+02:00

The recently published proceedings from the 1st Asian ESP International conference held at Choquing University last October include some very interesting papers, particularly if you are interested in ESP from the pre-experience perspective. In their foreword Dr Paul Robertson and Professor Roger Nunn write: "ESP practitioners are finding their role has become critical as the business world is expecting and demanding graduates to not only speak English, but to be conversant in Business Englishes and the other specialized fields of ESP (page 7)". What is noteworthy here is not only that ESP practitioners are seen as critical, but that there seems to be an increasing recognition that it is not just about English anymore, but specific Englishes.

Interestingly the same word "critical" also came up last week in BESIG's recent webinar, where Ian Badger spoke about business-critical language training. One of Ian's key points was about the requirement, particularly in times of economic slowdown, to focus on training which is vital to the success of the business, and not to waste time and resources on stuff that is not important.

I think both these perspectives are quite challenging for us as ESP practitioners. Do we really have the skills to do what industry is asking us to do, so that we can play this critical role? Can we teach Englishes? Can we identify and teach the critical language that it needed for successful international communication in specific contexts?

I think we are getting there, although I suspect we have a long way to go. But perhaps ESP is becoming the part of the English Language Teaching industry where being able to speak English and having a four-week TEFL certificate will no longer be enough. Other skills are required, and industry is beginning to tell us.

Hidden gems

2010-05-26T13:00:00.001+02:00

Darren Elliot over at Lives of teachers: a vast pool of human knowledge neglected, recently challenged ELT bloggers to write about "posts that are going to waste". Mike Harrison called these "hidden gems".

So many to choose from, but I thought I would keep it down to three.

On coursebooks. The ELT blogosphere has seen a lot of discussion about the future of coursebooks, much of it heated, but I think Eric Baber's calm analysis really focuses on what is actually happening, as opposed to what some people would like to see happening. Well worth a read.

On lists of phrases. Vicki Hollett has a great post here about the importance of scrapping lists of phrases and using adjacency pairs and longer stretches of discourse to teach, which is something all teachers and materials writers need to think about. But what I like most about the post is her example of an overheard elevator conversation. Read it. You'll enjoy it.

On learning styles. Helen Strong's post on learning styles raises some important issues about current thinking. For years teachers have been talking about the importance of catering for different learning styles, but the reality is that most models are too simplistic and not particularly useful in the classroom. Thought provoking.

Teaching high and low context communication styles

2010-05-24T18:40:00.002+02:00

One of our main tasks as BE teachers is to help our students (Ss) communicate with people from other cultures. I find Edward T Hall’s well known distinction between high and low context cultures very useful for this, and I’d like to suggest a few ways of incorporating it into the classroom.

Before we start I’ll just go over what we mean by high and low context cultures. It all has to do with the way different cultures communicate, and the role that the surrounding context plays. Low context cultures prefer to communicate explicitly through words - it is important to say what you think. Problems can be solved in isolation, and facts are central. “Separate the people from the problem” (Getting to Yes) is an example of a low context perspective of successful negotiation. High context cultures prefer to communicate by leaving certain things unsaid. The priority is to build relationships and to know what is going on. Empathy is key. Explicit explanations and details are unnecessary, and even insulting. People and problems are inextricably connected.

It is often argued that Western cultures like the USA and Germany are low context, whereas Asian cultures like Japan and China tend to be more high context, but it is important to note that Hall’s distinction does not only have to do with national cultures - co-workers who work with each other on a day-to-day basis might also be likely to communicate with each other in a high context way even if they come from a low context culture.

Here’s the thing. When these two communication styles come in contact with each other it is easy for both sides to get frustrated. High context cultures might see low context as insensitive, aggressive, rude, tactless, full of irrelevant information and overly preoccupied with the problem and not with the overall picture. Low context might see high context as dishonest, elusive, lacking real opinions, vague, ambiguous, dilatory, repetitive, and unable to focus on a problem. What we need to do as BE teachers is to provide activities which help our SS to understand the issues, and strategies to deal with them. Here are some ideas for you to adapt to your own context.

1 Introduce the concept of different communication styles. Write down various characteristics of high and low context cultures. Ask Ss to categorize them. Discuss how one culture might see the other. Elicit examples from Ss own experience.

2 Ask Ss to categorise the following phrases:

1 It is cold today. / Could you shut the window please?
2 Absolutely right! / That is possible.
3 I think before I speak. / I always say what I think.
4 I earn 6000 Euros a week. / I earn enough to keep my family happy.
5 We will find a way. / It is all in the contract.

(This list comes from Working in Asia, but you can make your own to suit your group).

3 If you are teaching functions eg making requests, apologising, get Ss to observe their own workplace and report back to the class about how high or low context the communication was.

4 If you like watching interviews (from the internet) with your class, next time ask Ss to make notes of what is "not being said". (Do the opposite if your class is from a high context culture).

5 If you use pictures, instead of discussing what is in the picture, discuss why the picture was taken. What message is the photographer trying to convey? (Do the opposite if your class is from a high context culture).

6 If you need to practice email writing, give Ss a task such as the one below:

Two of your suppliers are using family connections to supply goods and services. This is against company policy, which requires all suppliers to be selected according to specific criteria such as terms of delivery, price, and quality. One of your suppliers is from a low context culture, and the other is from a high context culture. Write emails to both your suppliers and inform them of company policy. Compare emails.

7 If you like doing role-plays or simulations with your class, next time give individuals in the group specific communication styles to follow.

8 If you are doing presentation training, ask Ss to prepare the same presentation for different audiences, one high context, one low context. If time is short, just get Ss to discuss how they would change it for a different audience.

My first prezi - Working in Asia

2010-05-13T14:16:00.005+02:00

Last week I went to the Languages and Business Conference in Düsseldorf - and I gave my first Prezi presentation (see below). What a brilliant tool for any presenter! Anyone who teaches presentation skills needs to know about this.

The presentation is about a book which I wrote with Shuna Hsu (based in Taipei) called Working in Asia. It's designed for German speakers who need to learn English to work in Asia or with Asians, and focuses on improving linguistic, discourse and intercultural communication competence within typical business contexts like relationship building, understanding organisations, managing people, meetings, project management, working in mulitcultural teams and so on. One of the things we are most proud of is the fact that we did not use any "native speakers" to record the cd which accompanies the book - it's all German and Asian speakers of English.

Working In Asia on Prezi

Gaming and language learning

2010-05-11T11:16:00.001+02:00

At a recent conference I attended one of the hot topics was the use of technology for teaching. I asked one of the speakers about the future of incorporating online gaming into the teaching of languages in the workplace, and I have to admit I was both surprised and disappointed by the response, which basically implied that corporations would not be interested in gaming as a training method. I was surprised because of the quick way in which the issue was discounted, and disappointed because I think there is so much potential in this area. See for example this blog entry by Suzie Boss, and this article by Bonnie Nardie et al.

This is an extract from a book I recently co-authored, Social and Health Expert. Although the topic of the unit it appears in is "Working with addiction" (the book is an ESP coursebook written for the German market and targeted at social and health workers), the arguments raised by a (fictitious) teenager defending online gaming are very pertinent to the whole area of using gaming to learn. I really think we discount it at our peril.

Extract from pages 184 - 185 - a teenager argues for online gaming

"I know people criticise games like World of Warcraft – they say that it’s not the real world, and that it cannot replace the real world. Of course they’re right. But look at all the benefits the game brings. First of all you get the chance to meet and chat with people from all over the world. I have friends in China, the USA, Australia, you name it. We link up via internet voice chat and spend a lot of time talking about the game and what’s going on in our lives. Where would I get a chance like that except on an internet game like WoW? Secondly the skills I am learning will be very useful in any job I go into. I often write small programmes, called addons, which affect how the software works. And I am a guild leader, which means I get to manage a large group of people. I have to decide who to recruit, where they have to be, what resources and equipment they need to have, how we are going to do something, resolve disputes, and so on. I even run a website where everything is co-ordinated. In the world of work this is called project management. So in a sense WoW is just like one big simulation where I can practice doing things in a safe environment. Basically it’s just another form of learning experience. I have heard that some companies actually like seeing what people have achieved in WoW because they can equate those achievements to real life skills. One of my guild members just had a baby – she said she can’t wait for the kid to be old enough to play WoW – there’s so much to learn."

A core curriculum

2010-04-25T15:54:00.000+02:00

Just attended the EAQUALS conference here in Berlin - as expected, some very interesting and thought provoking sessions. One which has been buzzing around my head was Brian North describing a current EAQUALS / British Council project which is trying to establish a "core curriculm" of language items which will match the various descriptors in the CEFR from A1 to C1.

Brian pointed out that one current limitation of the CEFR is that the descriptors do not really allow trainers to pin down the precise lexis or language points which might be taught at each level. So what happens in practice is that different trainers interpret descriptors in different ways, which means that their learners get taught quite different items. Now in an ESP world where training is designed to cater for the specific needs of the learners in the classroom this may not be an issue - the trainer and the learners are probably the best judges of what is most appropriate. But in many training contexts, such as large scale corporate training, a certain amount of consistency and standardization across different training groups will make the overall results much more efficient.

So this project, at least as I understand it, aims to provide a solution to this problem by combining feedback from practicing teachers and evidence from best selling coursebooks to produce a list of discrete language items which are typically taught at each level. This list is the "core curriculum", which can then be added to depending on local needs and context.

Of course there are some limitations in the approach. For a start only a relatively small numbers of teachers and books are involved. And it may be that language trainers have become accustomed to teaching certains items simply because they are in course books. Roger Hunt(IH Barcelone) gave us an exanple of this by reminding us of how many teachers only ever cover three or four "standard" conditional forms, ignoring a lot of the evidence from corpus linguistics about how conditionals are actually used. (see the Cambridge Grammar of English for more on this).

Even with these limitations the project should produce some very useful information for anyone involved in language training, even if it is only more debate and discussion about what we should be teaching. And of course it will be fascinating (at some point in the future) to compare the results of this project to the much more comprehensive English Profile project.

The goals of ESP

2010-04-22T08:56:00.000+02:00

Interesting post about the goals of ESP on the English 360 blog. Zoe Rose reports that "According to Dr Bedri, the goal of English for Special Purposes is this: For the learner to acquire higher competence in their field of ESP than an average native speaker." Here is the full post.

It's an interesting thought, although as always it will depend on the learning goals of the individual learners. It also depends how you define ESP. But definitely something to think about - thanks Zoe.

On context

2010-04-21T19:10:00.001+02:00

We often hear teachers talking about the importance of context, but what does context actually mean? Conversation analysts talk about context being shaped by conversation, meaning that what is said depends on what has gone before, but also influences what comes after. In this sense context is dynamic. Language teachers often use context to describe the words surrounding the target language (eg "Work out the meaning of this word from the context"), which seems to be a much more static perspective. And sociolinguists argue that interaction takes place within other levels of context - the relationships between interactants, for example, the institutional setting, as well as the sociocultural world the interactants find themselves in.

Why is this important? Basically because our job is to help our learners communicate within a context, and the more we can do to understand that context the better we will do. Ideally our aim should be to replicate the learners' real communication context as much as possible during the training.This is a major part of what needs analysis is all about.

Luckily eminent scholars have already provided us with some useful frameworks to do this - see for example Del Hymes S-P-E-A-K-I-N-G model and Saville-Troike's components of communication . Almut Koester's Investigating Workplace Discourse provides some excellent background reading and examples of analysing workplace interaction in practice.

In my experience a lot of trainers gather information like this somewhat informally, but it is easy to pay lip service to some of the more complicated items. And the result is that we train our learners to operate in a context we are familiar with, which is not quite the same as training them to operate in their own contexts. Just think about the last time you did presentations in a class. Did you follow the normal rules of rhetoric and slide design which you are comfortable with, or did you really analyse the context where the presentations would be taking place, and adapt your training accordingly?

Intercultural communication

2010-04-12T14:50:00.004+02:00

I love mangos. Unfortunately the ones our local (Berlin) supermarket sells are not very good, so when I am in Asia I usually eat my fill. I have lots of memories of lying awake at 3 am in Taiwanese hotel rooms with jet lag, gorging myself on succulent fruit as I watch sitcoms in Chinese, and I can definitely recommend a little mango shop in downtown Taipei. It's easy to find - it's the one with the long queues.

But this story is about a trip to Chennai I did last year - I was there when the mangos were in season. Branches on trees just outside my hotel room were straining with their heavy loads, and the streets seemed to be lined with fruit sellers desperate to sell. So I was very surprised on the first evening when I asked my Indian driver to stop and buy some mangos. "Sorry Sir, mangos not in season at the moment". I put it down to his maybe not understanding my request, or perhaps even surliness on his part, so I asked him again. The reply was the same, so I decided not to bother anymore, and I thought no more about it. The next day I had a different driver, and he stopped and bought two mangos for me without any problem. They were quite good.

But I did think more about it. I couldn't work out why he didn't want to stop. A few months later I related the story to an Indian friend of mine (hi Beena), who very kindly explained that in many parts of India the custom with mangos is to pick them and sell them before they are ripe - they ripen in the home, and so can be eaten just at the right time. The driver had been right after all. And my assumptions had been way off the mark.

This experience brought home to me (yet again) how easy to misinterpret people when communicating across cultures. Intercultural training can only go so far.

On credibility

2010-04-07T17:27:00.022+02:00

Have you ever had a class where someone asks a grammar question, and before long you are trying to explain things you really know very little about, and everyone knows it? Bye bye credibility ...

Two incidents in recent classes I watched made me think more about this issue of credibility. In the first the trainer had several years of teaching experience, and had always received good feedback. I watched as he proudly unveiled his new laptop to a group of marketing executives. His plan was to give a presentation on "Giving presentations". So far so good. Unfortunately his opening phrase set the mood - "(nervous laugh) ... these things never work properly for me". (Actually have you ever noticed how common that is at teacher conferences?). It went downhill from there. Every slide had as much animation as possible, including the one where letters appear one by one to the sound of machine gun fire. Using as many different fonts and colours as possible was no challenge at all. Reading from slides? No problem either. It was almost as if he was trying to break every rule in the book. The saddest thing was that he had obviously put a lot into preparing for the class. I left the room with one image in my mind - that of one of the executives with a look on his face which said "Are we really paying for this?"

The second was an experienced intercultural trainer who came very well prepared with lots of interesting activities which she knew worked well in class. The problem was that this particular class were all very experienced interculturists themselves - they had travelled widely as part of their jobs, and knew the issues first hand. What they wanted was help to work more effectively in their own contexts, not simplistic case studies which taught them nothing new. In the discussions it soon became very clear that the only intercultural experience the trainer could really draw on was growing up in a different country to the one she happened to be teaching in. She certainly had no experience of doing business in another culture. Basically she had no credibility, and the session was a disaster.

For me these incidents suggest two points about our own attitudes as trainers, and how we can damage our credibility. First, we must not forget our own limitations as trainers - it is so easy to persuade ourselves that we are the "experts", even when we are not. And secondly, we must never forget just how much our learners actually know - just because they can't share very well does not mean that they do not have anything to share.

Authenticity

2010-04-01T10:02:00.001+02:00

I was doing a teacher training session recently, and one of the questions which came up was "Why don't publishers make their listening texts more authentic". My off-the-cuff answer was that the problem was based on the nature of real speech - it doesn't always serve well as a teaching model, and is full of references to people and things which outsiders know nothing about.

But I think it's more than that. The issue is about the need to expose leaners to "real" language", and the debate has been going on for years. Publishers often claim that their content is "authentic" because they know that it will sell more books.

But what is "authentic"? One definition has to do with whether or not the text is designed for the classroom, or if it comes from the "real" world, whatever that is. And perhaps more importantly, does it have anything to do with the learners' real world? How relevant is it? A newspaper article might be authentic in that it wasn't written for the classroom, and it certainly has language that can be worked with, but the genre is actually not all that common in the workplace, so is it really the best we can do? And how authentic is a listening text without profanity? In my experience swearing and expletives are quite common in workplace discourse.

Authenticity also has to do with how a particular text is used. It is not enough for a text to come from the real world - it must also be used in a real world way. Of course this almost never happens in a classroom because the context is not a real world context, or rather, the classroom is a "different" real world. Perhaps we need to keep this in the back of our minds when we are designing materials and activities. How authentic is a piece of spoken or written text out of context? If it is no longer authentic than why use it at all?

So "authentic" is a relative term and has to do with how a particular text can be used in a particular teaching situation - it is not actually possible to say that a text is authentic without knowing the context it will be used in. An engineering diagram showing the insides of a gas turbine will be wonderfully authentic with one class, and completely inauthentic with another. The same goes for a listening text about stocks and shares. And so on.

But of course "authentic" does not necessarily mean "better". The real issue is not about making texts more authentic, but about finding texts which help our learners to learn. Inauthentic texts may appear contrived, but does this actually matter to the learner who is struggling to acquire new language?

If you're interested in reading more about this topic, here are a couple of links which I found useful:

A Critical Look at the Concept of Authenticity - Nematullah Shomoossi and Saeed Ketabi
What is Authenticity? Donna Tatsuki.

Harrogate online

2010-03-26T05:19:00.001+01:00

Have a look at the Business English Area and ESP Area at the IATEFL Harrogate Online forums. The moderators are doing a really great job of getting discussion going. See you there.

So that's what they look like ...

2010-03-11T09:57:00.000+01:00

I want to tell you about an exciting new website that I have just discovered. But first, a little background.

Yesterday I sent a review of a recent article by Clarice Chan to BESIG Issues. You will be able to read the review if you are a member of BESIG and get the newsletter, or you can read the original article here if you are a subscriber to English for Specific Purposes. However, the chances are that you won't be able to access either of these, and so are locked out of some useful research about business English teaching materials.

This is typical of the gap between teachers and researchers - both sides are doing work which is relevant to the other, but easy mechanisms to bridge that gap do not really exist. Most teachers simply do not have the time or money that it takes. I remember when I was doing my Masters I had access to almost any research I was interested in, but the day the certificate arrived was the day I was cut off from the world of research. It was a bitter sweet day.

But this morning I came across a wonderful website (thank you ELTeCS ) which is potentially going to solve this problem once and for all. Have a look at TESOLacademic . What a wonderful idea - a big thank you to Huw Jarvis.

And not only will we teachers and trainers now have access to all that wonderful research, but we get to find out what all these researchers actually look like. Perfect!

On chains and schackles

2010-03-04T07:58:00.001+01:00

Every now and then I look through the technology and EFL blogs, and I am always amazed at how much new stuff there seems to be. But most of it seems to about using the internet and Web 2.0. I very rarely come across people blogging about tools for analysing corpora, which I think has really changed the way ESP teachers operate. Maybe it's just old technology and just doesn't excite people any more, but I still find it very useful. In fact, I might go so far as to say I don't really see how ESP teachers can be effective without it.

My favourite software is Wordsmith tools , which allows you to do all sorts of things to a corpus. Not only does it provide useful insight into how language is really used, but it is so easy to build up a small corpus and use it to generate materials which hit the spot, both in terms of identifying and practicing language which is relevant to the learners, and also in terms of saving time.

Let me give you a example.

I had a class not so long ago which was composed of factory workers from the shop floor. Their company had been bought out by an American corporation, and English was becoming more and more essential, particularly in understanding written documentation. One week I wanted to practice lexis to do with safety and lifting equipment with my class, which had been identified as a priority by the company, so I needed lots of examples of this lexis in use which I could then use to make my materials. The class were no help because they didn't know the words yet. So I asked for and got copies of company manuals, and I also found lots of similar documents on the internet. Using Wordsmith tools it didn't take long at all to come up with lists of useful lexis in context. And if you want to know anything about how to identify wear and tear on chains and schackles you now know who to ask ...

One limitation of making our own corpora is that is relatively easy to build up a corpus of written communication, but very time consuming to produce one with spoken data. The BNC offers access to a spoken corpus for free, but of course it not an ESP corpus. Sadly CUP's business English corpus CANCODE is not accessible to outsiders. The technology I'm really looking forward to is one that allows us to make recordings of real language, and then transcribes it for us. Speech recognition software is getting better all the time, but it's not quite there yet.

WoW Virtual Conference

2010-03-01T13:10:00.000+01:00

One for the diary - The World of Work Virtual Conference is happening on 12 May 2010 at 3pm GMT. Well worth thinking about if you have time and you're interested in how technology is changing the way we operate. Maybe see you there.

Teaching telephone English

2010-02-27T16:15:00.001+01:00

Conversation analysts have long shown that closing sequences in telephone conversations are quite different to leave-taking in face-to-face communication. Here are the last few turns of a telephone conversation I recorded in an office the other day (A is in Europe, B is in China). The two speakers have just agreed on how they should move ahead with their project, so the objective of the call seems to have been achieved. All that remains is to say goodbye.

A ok?
B hmm
A good ok I'm gonna I'm going to carry on ye so you think about what we said and if there are any problems send send me an email
B ok
A ye it seems to be working quite well now I think
B ye
A ye?
B ye that's right
A ok
B ye thanks for calling
A ye and have a have a nice well I was going to say have a nice evening I mean have a nice sleep it's nearly midnight isn't it
B ye (laughs) ye its twelve o'clock
A ye twelve time time for a beer and bed ye?
B ye time for bed
A (laughs) ok take care take care Silvia
B ok
A ok bye bye
B ye bye

(from Frendo, unpublished data)

There seem to be three distinct phases to this closing sequence. First there is further reference to the project they have been discussing, even though it seems unnecessary, then there is some sort of relationship building going on, and then they finally end the call with the repetitive (but very typical) "ok, ok, bye, bye". At no point would it be appropriate for one of the speakers to suddenly put the phone down, even though the objective has been achieved - the ritual must be gone through.

I wonder if we need to formally teach our learners such sequences, and encourage them to do something similar during telephone role-plays? Or does it happen naturally in real conversation, where there are real people building real relationships? In my experience telephone role-plays in the classroom normally finish with a quick bye, bye, and then a glance towards the trainer to see if the call was satisfactory. Any thoughts anyone?

Propa English

2010-02-27T08:02:00.001+01:00

This post in a MMORPG made me laugh recently - someone typed something which didn't make sense, and the response was:

"soz u will have to speak in propa english cos i dont av a clue wat u on about lol"

I know there are a lot of cynics out there, but I think that online gaming is really challenging what we do as language teachers. People do online gaming because it's fun. But they have to develop real communication skills to do it successfully. And when they come from different language backgrounds, they often have to do it in English. Maybe the English they are using (and learning to use) is not quite what we might teach in class, but it certainly does the job. Just like English for the workplace ...

Needs analysis

2010-02-26T13:41:00.000+01:00

One of the jobs I do fairly regularly is observe trainers in action, and one thing I've noticed time and time again is that although the class is having fun and appears to be happy with what the trainer is doing, no-one seems to be questioning whether or not the training is really going to help them in the real world. Many learners seem to pass responsibility for what happens in the classroom to the trainer, who "knows best", and whose main job it seems is to keep everyone entertained, while at the same time organising activities which seem to be about "business English".

Now there might be very good reasons for this. Perhaps this is actually all that the class wants to do. Perhaps the trainer is following a syllabus which has already been agreed with the course sponsors. But it may also be possible that the trainer simply doesn't know enough about what the learners really need to be able to do in English, and doesn't have the tools to find out.

Here are some needs analysis tools I like using:

Questionnaires / surveys - pretty standard tool, but useful if it gives you information you don't already have. What I normally end up doing is using the information people write about their needs and wishes to form the basis of a discussion about what the syllabus should contain - in other words, using the questionnaires to negotiate the syllabus.

Interviews - these can be particularly useful after the course has started. I tend to give the class an activity, and then ask one of the learners to step outside and have a 5 minute chat about how the course is going. I use the chat to give individual feedback, but I also use the opportunity to listen to what the learner has to say when the rest of the class isn't there. It can be quite eye-opening.

Framework materials - my favourite type of materials. They don't take long to make, but can be incredibly good at drawing out information about what the learner does at work. A typical one for meetings might be as simple as:

Tell us about your last meeting. Who? Why? Where? When? How?

What word(s) best describe the meeting? problem solving / reviewing / reporting / planning.

Anecdote circles - unlike framework materials, which tend to focus on factual information, anecdote circles are useful in getting a more emotional response. So for example we might ask questions like: What did you most enjoy about your last meeting? or Did anything surprise you? Here we are using the power of storytelling to see the meeting from a different perspective.

Tests - task-based assessment can be very effective in an in-company situation. What I mean is that instead of giving learners a "standard" mass-produced test to do, give them a task which simulates what they do in real life. If they need to attend meetings, then simulate those meetings in class. If they need to give a presentation, then ask them to do one. This will tell you a lot about their ability to perform in the real world, and will help you diagnose where the problems are.

Target discourse analysis - probably the hardest thing to do - here I am talking about watching / recording / analysing how language is used in the target situation, and then using that information to make judgements about course content. The reality is that very few trainers have the skills or the opportunity to do this, but the good news is that there is so much excellent research out there on workplace communication that a lot of the work has already been done for us. So if your learners need English for meetings, read up on some of the latest findings.

Work-shadowing - observe the learner in the workplace.

Stakeholders - maintain regular contact with other stakeholders - HR departments, managers, sponsors etc, and discuss objectives and course content with them.

In my book How to Teach Business English I wrote about needs analysis being a "series of snapshots, none of which gives the complete truth, but all of which contribute to understanding" (page 16). I still think this is a useful metaphor. But what is important is that we keep taking those snapshots, and not fall into a false sense of security because everything seems to be going well.

Needs analysis never ends.