This article is about teaching business English. From a personal point of view, this has always been my favourite form of teaching English. My experience is in Madrid, Spain but this advice covers most countries with teaching Business English.

I was lucky to have a strong business background in law and HR so it felt like a natural route for me to take. However many of my graduates get very nervous about teaching business English, especially if they are new graduates with limited experience in the business world

What are you teaching?

The first thing to remember is that you are teaching English in a business context, not teaching business in English. Many of the directors I have taught have talked about how patronizing they find it for a college graduate to walk into their office and start teaching them how to give a presentation! They know how to give a presentation, they need help with the tone and terminology in English – ensure your classes are never patronizing. Many of the teaching text books do fall into this trap so make sure you adapt your classes to your audience.

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You and your students might already enjoy reading and listening to poetry in your own language and perhaps in English too. Poems are, after all, authentic texts. This is a great motivator. Poems are often rich in cultural references, and they present a wide range of learning opportunities. For me, the aim is to teach English through poetry, not to teach the poetry itself, so you don’t need to be a literature expert.

Most of the tried and tested activities used regularly by language teachers can be adapted easily to bring poetry into the classroom.

• Communicative speaking activities

• Working on pronunciation

• Writing activities

• Some pros and cons

• Conclusion

Communicative speaking activities

Before doing any productive work, I like to give my students plenty of pre-reading activities so that they are adequately prepared.

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Activities to improve pronunciation in young learners of English

By

David Ockert

Key Words: Young learners, games, activities, pronunciation

Learner English Level: Pre-beginner, beginner

Learner Maturity Level: Young learner

Preparation Time: 5 minutes or less

Activity Time: Usually from 10-30 minutes

Materials: The card game Uno!

The activities presented herein are hoped to help young Japanese learners of English (JLE) understand and recognize the differences in pronunciation of /b/ vs. /v/, and /l/ vs. /r/, which are possibly the most distinctively recognizable of any English consonants when mispronounced by Japanese students of English, because so many words in English have different meanings when these sounds are not pronounced correctly (Avery & Ehrlich, pp.134-138). They make the difference between hearing, “Would you like some more lice?” vs. “Would you like some more rice?” And, in my case, the name is Dave, not Debu – fatso in Japanese (Ockert, 2006).

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Google is special among search engines in that it has become a starting point for enquiries and data searches of all forms. As most of this data is linguistic, it deserves special attention from language teachers, but until now, search has been largely ignored by most course writers.

In this article I give several practical examples of how you can use Gffoogle, combined with a lexical approach to teaching, to enrich your class material with authentic examples, as well as building learner autonomy.

Google and lexis
Lexis, as most of you will know, is simply another term for ‘vocabulary’. The Lexical Approach treats language as a series of prefabricated lexical chunks. Its methodology puts grammar in second place to vocabulary.

The approach I will outline here is based on inputting ‘lexical chunks’ (strings of vocabulary or phrases) into Google’s various search functions to find samples of real world text. These are split into different types.

How Google treats language

This is a little complicated. What you need to know is that…

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Homework
by BBC TeachingEnglish Editor

“Homework seems to be an accepted part of teachers’ and students’ routines, but there is little mention of it in ELT literature. The role of homework is hardly mentioned in the majority of general ELT texts or training courses, suggesting that there is little question as to its value even if the resulting workload is time-consuming. However, there is clearly room for discussion of homework policies and practices particularly now that technology has made so many more resources available to learners outside the classroom.

Reasons for homework

• Attitudes to homework
• Effective homework
• Types of homework
• Conclusion

Reasons for homework

• Homework is expected by students, teachers, parents and institutions.
• Homework reinforces and helps learners to retain information taught in the classroom as well as increasing their general understanding of the language.
• Homework develops study habits and independent learning. It also encourages learners to acquire resources such as dictionaries and grammar reference books. Research shows that homework also benefits factual knowledge, self-discipline, attitudes to learning and problem-solving skills.
• Homework offers opportunities for extensive activities in the receptive skills which there may not be time for in the classroom. It may also be an integral part of ongoing learning such as project work and the use of a graded reader.”

Read the rest of ‘Homework’ article by visiting http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/think/articles/homework

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istening is one of the most challenging skills for our students to develop and yet also one of the most important. By developing their ability to listen well we develop our students’ ability to become more independent learners, as by hearing accurately they are much more likely to be able to reproduce accurately, refine their understanding of grammar and develop their own vocabulary.

In this article I intend to outline a framework that can be used to design a listening lesson that will develop your students’ listening skills and look at some of the issues involved.

• The basic framework

• Pre-listening

• While listening

• Post-listening

• Applying the framework to a song

• Some conclusions”

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Here is Gavin Dudeney’s second exclusive article for TeachingEnglish.

I’m fortunate enough to be able to go to quite a few face-to-face conferences every year, generally as a speaker, though I also attend as many sessions as I can at each event – there’s always something to learn from any speaker, no matter how experienced they are. This year I’ve seen some great speakers, not just some of the more famous people in ELT, but a wide variety of teachers talking about what they do with great passion, and sharing their experiences and teaching ideas. In fact, these types of events are my favourite kind of professional development, combining – as they do – the talks, plenaries and workshops with fun social activities and occasionally some sightseeing.

But of course not everybody is lucky enough to be able to go to these events very often, and have to rely on local development opportunities such as workshops or in-school training. And, at least in my experience, this is actually relatively rare too. In all my travels this year I’ve met hundreds of teachers who receive no professional development each year. It’s as if they’ve simple been forgotten about… Now they’re in place and teaching, there’s no need to develop them any further or help them widen their repertoire, at least that is what seems to me happens in many schools. So what is a teacher to do in that kind of situation?

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Duncan says, “I have often found that learners of all levels feel that there is inadequate time spent on listening in most language courses. Adult learners often complain that (sometimes) after years of study, they can’t understand native speakers. This is partly because they do not receive adequate exposure to authentic texts in class. Another is that it’s hard to find authentic audio texts that can be easily adapted for classroom use.

To tackle these issues, I have developed an approach to listening based loosely on the way children learn languages. I’ve found this to be hugely advantageous in my own language learning, and have passed it on to my students with considerable success.

Children versus adults – children win
According to estimates (Pinker, S., The Language Instinct, 150-151), an average six year old commands about 13,000 words, equivalent to acquiring a new word every two hours.

Children have huge advantages over adult foreign learners in the classroom – they are constantly exposed to the target language and their brains are optimized for rapid language acquisition.

In this article, I argue for a ‘simulated immersion’ approach. The idea is that learners engage in a variety of different types of listening in their own time, similar to what they would encounter if they were living in an English speaking country. Essentially they are trying to mimic the language learning behaviour of young children.”

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Topical news stories are a great source of teaching material. This article presents different ways to exploit news reports in the classroom and focuses on raising the level of involvement and participation that the students have in the lesson.

• Selection criteria

• Before reading

• First reading

• Second reading

• Language focus

• Follow up

• Sources

 Selection criteria

It is important that you choose your news article wisely. You should consider the following criteria.

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This is, of course, as much a key topic in the UK as it was in 1985 when this book was originally published. The book aimed to cover ‘English teaching to British residents’ and addresses teaching children in the school sector; teaching adults in education and in the workplace; and teacher training, among others. One chapter asks ‘Can ESL teaching be racist?’

English as a Second Language in the United Kingdom

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