Chapter 19: Getting Specific: Teaching Just One Student and Business English 281
✓ Tell me about your background, culture and interests.
✓ Do you have a particular location in mind for the lessons?
✓ How often and how long do you want your lessons be?
✓ Can you provide a sample of your writing – a recent email for example?
When teaching business English, you do more than check the student’s
overall grammar and vocabulary, you also get him ready for the particular
situations he’s to face.As the spectrum of occupations requiring a certain level of English is so wide,
there may be cases where very little specialist knowledge of that industry is
required.If you can get a foothold in teaching people your own specialism in English,
so much the better. In addition, for some the most difficult words in the job
are similar to English ones anyway. For example, when teaching Italian
surgeons I found that their lack was in everyday language for communicating
with immigrant patients and for socialising, not the Greek- and Latin- based
terminology of medical journals. After all, English is the international
language of science and technology now but the words we use often originate
elsewhere.Fortunately, a business English class is sometimes pretty straightforward. If
you’re teaching a whole class that’s enrolled at your school, you’ll probably
be given a course book or a syllabus to teach from. Some classes are geared
towards exams such as Cambridge BEC or LCCI qualifications which a
teacher with experience of general English exams can handle with a little
extra preparation. (I talk about English proficiency exams in Chapter 21.)The main difference between general and business English is register (formal
and informal styles), and the organisation of a functional-notional syllabus,
which means that instead of learning one piece of grammar or vocabulary
after another, getting progressively more difficult, the syllabus focuses on
situations and tasks. For example, the first chapter may be about making
phone calls and teach whole phrases like, ‘Hold the line please. I’ll put you
through’. The next chapter may cover welcoming visitors to the office and
so on. So it’s still the English you’re used to, but organised in a different way.
For this reason, you need to teach chunks of language that students can
memorise even if they don’t understand the grammar involved.Use real communications like business letters, faxes and emails you’ve
received and look regularly at the business pages in national newspapers.