Readers of this blog may know that Clarice Chan and I are currently co-editing a new book in TESOL’s New Ways series, called New Ways in Teaching Business English. The book is basically a collection of activities which teachers can use in their own classes, and includes traditional style activities to practice spoken and written business communication, as well as lots of new activities which make use of things like social media and technology. We’re hoping it becomes a very useful resource book for business English teachers all over the world. If you would like to contribute you can find all the information you need here. The deadline is 1 June 2013.

This is the first time I have co-edited a book like this, and I am pleasantly surprised by how many people are willing to contribute.

Another country, another conference, and yet another chance to meet up with ESP colleagues from around the world and discuss and debate issues and concerns. This time the conference was TESOL in Dallas, and a full programme of talks and sessions about ESP and teaching English.

One thing struck me again – how far corporate language training is from the academic perspective of ESP offered in tertiary institutes around the world.

Just come back from observing a class in a company. The group was made up of people from different departments and different professional backgrounds, and the trainer came from a nearby language school. 

As part of an activity the trainer asked the class to brainstorm the sorts of written texts they had to deal with in their day-to-day work.

TESOL ESP interest section members will be aware of the regular discussions which are hosted on the TESOL community website. Topics have been wide ranging, and have included things like “Teaching Tips and Success Stories in ESP”, and “Exploring for excellence in EMP practice”. Last year there was a joint discussion with IATEFL’s ESP SIG called "English for Specific Purposes (ESP) around the world in academic and occupational contexts".

As ESP practitioners we often explain what we do by talking about the sort of English we teach. So we say that we teach business English, or medical English, or legal English, and people have a rough idea what we mean.

Needs analysis is fundamental to what we do. It tells us what we should focus on, and what we can safely leave out. In this post I would like to describe three frameworks I often use to find out more about the processes my learners meet in their workplace, and then use the information to help make decisions about where the training priorities should be.

One of the biggest challenges facing business English and ESP teachers is how to bring examples of the target discourse, ie the discourse that the learners need to learn, into the classroom. Of course there are many techniques – we can use the learners as a resource, or we can use course books, or authentic materials, or other members of the discourse community, and so on; all these have their advantages and disadvantages.

I was recently doing some teacher training at a company in the South of Germany, and I wanted to give everyone a copy of a recent journal article as one of the handouts. I won’t embarrass the journal in question, (a well-known journal in the English teaching industry), but the prices quoted were well out of my league (or at least out of the league of the teachers in the workshop, who would have had to cover the costs). The result, of course, was that no-one got the article.

I’m still reflecting on a hectic couple of weeks last month at the IATEFL conference in Glasgow (19-23 March) and the TESOL convention in Philadelphia (28-31 March). As always, some really great ESP and Business English sessions to think about, some of which I’d like to share with you. Because it is so hard to choose which sessions to cover I’ve decided to limit myself to just five, selected primarily because the speakers have made at least some of their content / handouts available online.

“A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be.” Albert Einstein

“Yes, ELF is all very well, but how do we actually teach it?” This is the question which teachers and trainers all over the world are asking.  And in fact this is the theme at the next BESIG PCE and also the next ELF conference in Istanbul.

My own feeling is that a lot of business English trainers have been moving to a TELF approach for a number of years, but we just haven’t been calling it ELF or BELF.
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