Go to 'Business English - the corporate approach'

Over the last two years I have been teaching on a course for Business Students at the University of Salford. This would, I would think, lead me to have a rather different understanding of the concept of ‘Teaching Business English’ from that which informs the work of Accent International. However, to fully deal with the topic “What I understand by ‘Teaching Business English’” this side of my experience probably needs to be discussed.

I teach on Salford’s Diploma in Management and English course (DME). This is a one year postgraduate course for non-native speaker students who hope to go on to study for taught Master’s qualifications, and is taught by the Department of Modern Languages in conjunction with the Department of Management. In Management lectures students study a variety of business related subjects, such as international marketing and human resource management. English classes concentrate on helping students to reflect on such learning, building vocabulary and productive skills, and, especially, providing students with the academic study skills they need to write a series of assignments and a mini-dissertation, and hopefully to equip them with the necessary language skills to embark on Masters level study. As such the course has elements in common with other English for Academic Purposes (EAP) programs. While the course is open to students from anywhere in the world, the vast majority of participants come from the People’s Republic of China, with smaller numbers coming from South Asia, the Far East and the Middle East.

A number of factors contrast the academic approach to Teaching Business English with my experience of teaching in a corporate context:

• Students are generally younger than corporate Business English clients (typically in their early twenties) and are mostly pre-experience, with a few having worked for maybe one or two years after their degree. The students’ lack of experience rather changes the status relationship between teacher and class. In many corporate Business English contexts students are senior people, and experts in their fields: engineers, Senior Executives, or Company Accountants. In this kind of context the teacher has to take an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) approach, recognizing that the skill set under discussion is outside his range of professional experience, but helping the student to learn through describing his or her work. By contrast, I bring to the academic business English classes I teach many years of experience in a variety of fields and outside the teaching profession, and a real understanding of how the various management theories they discuss in lectures relate to the real world of work; effectively, I know considerably more about the field of study than the students do; this does not happen in corporate Business English classes!

• I teach comparatively large classes, with fifteen to twenty students enrolled in each. Although students have regular individual tutorials, this contrasts with the one to one or small group approach taken in corporate business English teaching.

• My students are resident in the UK for at least a year at a time. This inevitably means that they have concerns over spoken English and survival language that are not shared by corporate clients who fly into a training centre for a two or three week intensive course. As such, classes sometimes share elements with ESL teaching. What the Salford DME students do, however, share with such corporate clients is a perception of using English as a Global Language, where it is more likely in the future that they will be speaking English to other non-native speakers than to inhabitants of Britain, the U.S. or Australia.