Go to Business English - the academic approach

The corporate approach to Business English Teaching is characterised by a number of factors:

• The teaching itself takes place in a commercial, business environment. Good client and customer relations are essential to grow the business and attract new students. This means that training provision has to be highly customer focused. Students who are sent for training have specific and exact needs which are specified by their sponsors and need to be closely adhered to. While universities and other educational institutions increasingly need to operate in the commercial world, the agenda for what they teach remains in the hands of academics, not in those of their clients.

• As such, a comprehensive approach to needs analysis is essential in a successful corporate English training organization. Successful corporate Business English Teaching is informed by the standards and practices of general Corporate Training, as I have experienced it as a trainer in the field of IT training, and as a participant on numerous course in areas such as Total Quality Management or Negotiation Skills. Such standards and practices do not tend to find their way into the curriculum process of general English classes, or indeed academic Business English classes.

• Corporate Business English Teaching is not monolithic. While the students at Bicton College, and at Linguarama’s Riversdown House centre where I worked for a year, are likely to be senior managers on closely targeted courses, other models exist. Working for the English Language Centre in Trento in Italy two years ago, I taught classes at Scania Trucks plant in the city. Scania, a Swedish company, here with a plant in Italy, uses English for internal communications, and has a policy for all employees to be competent in English. This means that while I had classes made up of managers and secretaries, I also taught a weekly class of warehouse employees.

• Ideally, individually tailored teaching materials would be written for each and every one-to-one student or group taught in a corporate context. However, this may not be cost effective. A better approach may be to build up a modular materials bank, based on both published and internally written materials, graded by level and classified by professional subject area. Such a bank of materials would grow with successive clients and would need regular updating and close monitoring of developments in the clients’ professional fields, together with regular updating based on changes in ELT theory and published materials.