ELTWeekly Issue#27, Research Paper: Technology – the ‘Teacher’s Assistant’ for teaching Business Communication

Technology – the ‘Teacher’s Assistant’ for teaching Business Communication

By Ms. Mukti Shah

Abstract

Information and communications technology (ICT) is developing at a great pace and every day it seems to affect more aspects of our lives. Advances in ICT have significantly transformed the business situations. It has become an integral part in all aspects of business. Within past decade, the use of various tools of ICT has fundamentally changed the practices and procedures within business and governance producing sufficient transformations in industry, agriculture, medicine, engineering etc. It has been used extensively by researchers, trend setters and policy makers. Along with other fields of human activities, ICT also has significant transformational effects on education too. Optimizing ICT has become one of the major challenges facing our education system. It is the need in the era of ‘Information Revolution’ that we harness it to promote learning and teaching and improve pupils’ attainment.

In recent years integration of instructional technology into the classroom has become a significant part of education. As such resources for educating and assisting faculty in this new arena have become crucial.

The present paper tries to affirm that the use of technology in teaching and learning Business Communication has the potential to transform the nature of learning. The paper focuses on pedagogical innovations to prepare the learners of Business Communication to meet the challenges in the electronic and communication era.

Keywords: Business Communication, technology, E-learning, Chalk and Talk method, Instructional Technology, Word Processing, Knowledge Based System, Intelligent Agent, Decision Support System, Data Warehousing and Mining, optimization Techniques , web-based learning

Introduction

Communication in business is used to promote a product, service, or organization; relay information within the business; or deal with legal and similar issues. It is also a means of relying between a supply chain, for example the consumer and manufacturer.

Business Communication encompasses a variety of topics, including Marketing, Branding, Customer relations, Consumer behaviour, Advertising, Public relations, Corporate communication, Community engagement, Research & Measurement, Reputation management, Interpersonal communication, Employee engagement, Online communication, and Event management. It is closely related to the fields of professional communication and technical communication.

Most of the universities across the world which offer management courses, prescribe the subject of Business Communication as part of their curriculum. Some common topics which are generally included are: Oral -Aural Communication, Written Communication, Business Letters and Reports, Employment Communication, Presentation Skills etc.

Listening skills in language teaching have been neglected and shifted to a secondary position after speaking and writing. This is a surprising fact given that it is the skill that is most often used in communication. It is thought that about forty percent of our daily communication is spent on listening, thirty-five percent on speaking, sixteen percent on reading, and only nine percent on writing. Yet, in spite of its critical role in communication and language acquisition, listening comprehension remains one of the least understood processes in language learning. By now language practitioners have accepted that listening skills have to be taught like any other language skills.

An innovative approach to teaching listening skills has emerged due to the hi-tech developments. One of them is a so called ‘podcasting’, which has recently become very popular. The term ‘podcast’ was first coined in 2004, and it means the publishing of audio via the Internet. Audio recording is designed to be downloaded and listened to on a portable MP3 player of any type, or on a personal computer. Listening to audio is nothing new to the Internet. Audio files available for downloading and other means of online listening have been around for some time. Podcasting differs from other ways of delivering audio online by the idea of automatically downloaded content. Podcasting offers language teachers and students a wide range of possibilities for extra listening practice both inside and outside of the classroom. Moreover, podcasts enable students to practice listening in a self-directed manner and at their own pace. By 2005, the concept of ‘podcasting’ reached its top point: thousands of podcasts were created, and The New Oxford American Dictionary named a ‘podcast’ its official ‘Word of the Year’.

Defining podcasting and its advantages:

‘Podcasting’, created by former MTV VJ Adam Curry, is a term that was devised as a way to describe the technology used to push audio content from websites down to consumers of that content, who typically listen to it on their iPod (hence the ‘pod’) or other audio player that supports MP3 at their convenience. The term podcasting is meant to rhyme with broadcasting. According to P. Constantine (2007),

A podcast is the name of a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program. Podcasts published on the internet as MP3 files.  Interested listeners are able to download these MP3 files onto their personal computer or personal MP3 player of any type. The files can be listened to at the convenience of the listener.  Learners can listen over and over to any material that is of interest to them.  Podcasts can be as short as two to three minutes and as long as an hour.  Learners can subscribe to a podcast through an RSS subscription (Really Simple Syndication).

According to T. Robb (2007),

The rise in popularity of podcasting actually allows the reincarnation of activity types that have recently fallen into disuse. In the 70s and 80s, it was common for teachers to have their students record their own voice for various types of practice activities, such as the practice of specific segmental phonemes, or ‘pair taping’ activities where the students had to record their own conversations. Now with digital recording, it is back, and in a form that it easier than ever to use and with greater functionality.

Podcasts are part of innovative online learning and can serve a number of purposes: to enhance the range and register of English language listening practice material available for the students to use in a variety of ways; to provide increased connectivity between different elements of the course; to increase the scope for discussion activity, etc.

Subscribing to podcasts:

A common way to subscribe to podcasts if via specialized software such as “Juice” a free podcast receiver (Figure 1).

Figure 1 — Juice Podcast Receiver

Another free podcast manager is the Google Reader for those with a Google or Gmail account. The screenshot in Figure 2 shows the reader in action. It can be used for any type of RSS “news feed,” not just for podcasts.

Figure 2 — Google Reader RSS Aggregator

The podcasts online have given the language teacher a wealth of materials for teaching Listening Skills.  The advantages of podcasts are: 1) learners can benefit from global listening, even if they only listen from three to five minutes a day; 2) students will be exposed to the new language; 3) the intermediate learner has a need for authentic texts and to be exposed to a variety of voices. Podcasts are not just intended for listening.  Often there is a transcript provided along with worksheets.  A number of websites interact with the students and ask them to write in with questions or comments.  According to P. Constantine (2007), one innovative usage of podcasts is to have a student listen to a podcast and read along its transcript. Then the student will make a recording of the material on a cassette tape and turn it into the teacher along with a written journal.  The teacher then listens to the student’s recording and gives appropriate feedback to the student.  This type of activity helps the students to develop fluency in reading, to improve pronunciation, to acquire new vocabulary words, and to perfect listening skills.

It is assumed that podcasting is especially interesting for learners of Business Communication as it provides a means for students to get access to ‘authentic’ listening sources about almost any subject that may interest them. Teachers can take advantage of podcasts as a basis for listening comprehension exercises, as a means of generating conversation based on students’ reaction to podcasts, and as a way of providing each and every student diverse listening materials.

Although once labelled a passive skill, listening is an active and demanding process of selecting and interpreting information from auditory and visual clues. In listening, there are several major steps that may occur sequentially or simultaneously, in rapid succession, or backward and forward. The major points include determining a reason for listening, predicting information, attempting to organize information, assigning a meaning to the message, and transferring information from short-term memory to long-term memory.

Earlier research into listening processes by V. M. Rivers (1992:18) suggests that “listening involves active cognitive processing – the construction of a message from phonic material”. Three stages in the aural reception of a message are distinguished: 1) “listeners must recognize in phonic substance sound patterns in bounded segments related to phrase structure. At this stage students are dependent on echoic memory, which is very fleeting. 2) Listeners must immediately begin processing, identifying the groupings detected according to the content of our central information system. 3) Listeners recycle the material they organized through immediate memory, thus building up an auditory memory which helps to retain the segments listeners are processing”. An important feature of the listening process is that much of processing of incoming information takes place during the pauses in speech. Pauses in natural speech allow students to gain processing time. Moreover, much of comprehension involves drawing inferences. A characteristic feature of listening is a creation of mental messages which are stored by learners. This phenomenon is known as a false recognition memory.

The role of vocabulary knowledge and its recognition in listening affects comprehension of information. The term ‘listenability’ as an oral equivalent of ‘readability’ was coined by J. Read (2000:11). The simple readability idea focuses on two variables: the frequency of the complex vocabulary and the length of the sentences. The number of long words (three syllables or longer) and the number of words in a sentence define comprehensibility of a text. Lexical density is a variable showing the percentage of content words. A vocabulary measure may provide an indication of how easy it will be for learners to understand a spoken text. In listening, it is not just the relative frequency of the content words that affects comprehension but also how concentrated they are in the text.

The important issue in comprehension is authenticity of listening materials. The exact meaning of authenticity has often been unclear (Dudley-Evans and Jo St John, 1998:27): “many have used it with reference to genuine (not simplified) texts that were originally written for purposes other than language teaching”. Authenticity may be present in the following way: the language is as natural as possible, items are contextualized rather than isolated topics are meaningful (relevant and interesting for the learners), tasks represent real-world tasks. In other words, authenticity implies real language, which is the hardest to understand, because no concessions are made to non-native speakers – language is unlikely to be simplified or spoken slowly. For learners, authenticity often means negative expectations, i.e. listening is bound to be too difficult. When learners listen to unfamiliar speech they hear an almost continuous chain of sounds. Inexperienced learners do not actually hear the boundaries of words. For this reason, they describe the speech as too fast. Experienced learners are able to break down this chain into separate words in their heads because they are familiar with the sounds and can create meaningful words with them.

The role of intonation and pronunciation is crucial. Intonation is the ability to vary the pitch and tune of speech. Stressing words and phrases correctly is vital if emphasis is to be given to the important parts of messages. Different turns are signaled by the rise and fall in pitch. People hear certain accented words as prominent because of intonation. Knowing the language well, there is no need to hear every single sound in every single word to know what is said, because one’s mind is able to fill in the gaps and to determine where one word ends and the other begins. Intonation is interrelated with pronunciation. The aspect of pronunciation is crucial to listening. Major problems that occur in learning pronunciation are students’ great difficulty in hearing pronunciation features, in intonation – ‘tunes’ or identifying the different patterns of rising and falling tones.

One of the most difficult tasks for any teacher is to teach the skills of listening, because successful listening skills are acquired over time and with lots of practice Learning Listening Skills is frustrating for students because there are no rules as in grammar teaching. One of the largest inhibitors for students is often mental block. While listening students suddenly decide they do not understand. At this point, many students just tune out – some students convince themselves they are not able to understand spoken English well and create problems for themselves.

Having examined the available sources on developing learners’ listening skills in Business Communication teaching classes, it is easier to understand why Internet audio has suddenly become popular now. Although Internet audio and video files have been around for many years, recent technical innovations allow subscribers with portable MP3 players to use technology for downloading podcasts and to listen to files at one’s own convenience. This opens up new educational potential of using unproductive time for learning.

Here is a list of some websites that deal with podcasting technology. The podcasts can be downloaded (http://www.elanguages.ac.uk/podcast/index.html).

Various research projects are investigating the use of podcasting in education. Details of these can be found on the website of the IMPALA Project (http://www.impala.ac.uk/index.html), a Higher Education Academy research project into podcasting. A brief overview of how podcasting can be used in teaching listening skills is provided by T. N. Robb who suggests that there are three basic modes of activities for podcasting: 1) students as consumers, and teachers create material for students or assign them to listen to one of the many available ESL podcast sites; 2) students as producers or publishers, and teachers have students create material for others to listen to; 3) students practice through various exercises.

Podcasts can be chosen by learners from the website such as http://a4esl.org/p/ which includes the following sections:

VOA Special English
Links to Podcasts for ESL
Links to Podcasts for Native English Speakers
Links to Downloadable MP3 Files

The reason why learners should be free to choose podcasts for themselves is to enable them to self-assess their listening abilities individually. The idea is to motivate learners in the future to develop listening comprehension skills without the threat of teacher’s evaluation. Non-threatening practice may help learners who dread taking risks and who will enjoy some success in individual listening.

Collective listening to records in class differs from individual listening to podcasts in many aspects, such as in the former either top-down or bottom-up techniques are employed, students work in pairs or small groups, listening themes are brainstormed, essential vocabulary is generated, students do various exercises before the listening procedure, e.g. matching vocabulary items with their definitions, predicting the contents or the details of the recorded material, etc.

Listening autonomously in one’s spare time ensures independence of learner’s judgment of one’s performance and helps develop critical approach to evaluation of success or failure in the activity. Also, there is an opportunity of improving listening skills from reading transcripts as a follow-up exercise. An approach to independent self-evaluation helps learners assess their abilities to follow authentic English speech.

Conclusion:

In this paper, the researcher infers that there is an opportunity for raising language awareness and thereby teaching listening communication by employing podcasting which allows learners to carry out homework assignments at their own pace and under non-threatening conditions. Online methodology involves downloading a variety of podcasts and listening to them at the convenient time. Follow-up classroom discussions on benefits or failures of listening to podcasts enable each learner to evaluate their ability to understand authentic records. Summarizing various types of listening experiences in individual weblogs allows learners to store written records of their progress for the future reference.

The implications of this research are numerous. First, individual online listening to podcasts at one’s own pace and at convenient time prompts and motivates learners to improve skills of listening without being intimidated by possible failure. Second, raising learners’ awareness of suitable individual ways of perfecting the listening skill promotes language learning. Third, the novelty and diversity of out-of-class listening motivates learners to perfect their skills without being observed by peers or teachers. Fourth, harmonizing online listening with classroom audition activities in teaching/learning English should benefit all learners. Fifth, learners become aware that listening skills can be improved through a lot of practice of their own choice. Finally, self-assessing one’s achievements and publishing a self-evaluation report in individual weblogs encourage learners to keep improving.

References:

Brown, H. D. (2004). Language Assessment. Principles and Classroom Practices. White Plains, NY: Pearson Education.

Constantine, P. (2007). Podcasts: another source for listening input. The Internet TESL Journal. 13 (1). Retrieved 29th January 2007 from http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Constantine-PodcastListening.html.

Cook, V. (1996). Second Language Learning and Language Teaching. London: Arnold.

Dudley-Evans, T. and St John, M. J. (1998). Developments in English for Specific Purposes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rivers, V. M. (1992). Communicating Naturally in a Second Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Robb, T. N. Podcasting for ELT – What, Why and How? Retrieved June 2007 from http://www.cc.kyoto-su.ac.jp/~trobb/podcasting2.html.

Salmon, G. (2006). Informal mobile podcasting and learning adaptation project (IMPALA Project).Retrieved 3 June 2008 from http://www.impala.ac.uk/outputs/index.html.

Survey of podcast users. Retrieved 10 June 2007 from http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/radio/specials/1720_ten_years/page8.shtml

Sharma, P., and B. Barrett. (2007). Blended Learning. Using Technology In and Beyond the Classroom. London: Macmillan.

Szendeffy, J. (2005). A Practical Guide to Using Computers in Language Teaching. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Vandergrift, L. (2006). Second language listening: ability or language proficiency? The Modern Language Journal. 90, 6-18.

*Ms. Mukti Shah works as a Lecturer in English at Naran Lala College of Commerce and Management, Navsari.