From English Teacher to Business English Trainer
It’s January – a time for fresh starts. Let’s say you’re browsing through job listings looking for a new teaching position or simply a couple of extra classes. You come across one that reads: Business English Trainer. The ad looks professional, which is promising, so you click on the job description. Here you’re met with terms such as global business clients, design the course content to suit the specific needs of the company and design training sessions. What are your initial thoughts?
Even someone who has the necessary qualifications and experience expected of an English teacher, might start to wonder: “Am I eligible to apply for such a position? I’ve spent the better part of my career in the classroom, but I don’t have much experience with companies. Would this job be very different from teaching as I know it? Would I end up in a tedious corporate job that I have been hoping to avoid?” Or, if you’re lucky enough to have a positive, can-do attitude, you might think: “Being a Business English Trainer is exactly the same, only instead of films, sports and hobbies, we’ll talk about meetings, emails and business trips..”
How different is teaching Business English from teaching General English? Which teaching skills are transferable and what areas does one need to focus on more? Does the teacher need a completely different attitude? In this post, we would like to help you answer these questions for yourself so that the next time you’re considering such a position, you can make the best decision. If you already have some Business English classes, we hope you’ll find some fresh ideas here to incorporate in your lessons.
5 big differences between Business English and General English
1. The level
Teaching Business English, one needs to be prepared to meet intermediate or higher level students. Of course, this is not to say that lower-level Business English doesn’t exist, but there are arguments to suggest that General English would be better for lower-level learners to give them a foundation before learning in a BE context. When it comes to teaching higher levels, perhaps the biggest challenge is that progress often seems slower, as opposed to lower levels where students tend to develop in leaps and bounds. This can lead to dissatisfaction or frustration for some students, which can be combated by providing them with tailor-made lessons that train them in what they really need in their day-to-day life. How best to do this? Consider our tips below.
2. Doing it as opposed to talking about it
Let’s say your students’ job involves selling their products or services to foreign clients. Consequently, they’d like to get better at doing presentations or sales pitches. Which task would be more useful for them: reading a story about a sales pitch which failed due to a funny misunderstanding or doing a mock pitch based on their company’s services?
I’d suggest the latter. In the classroom, students should do what they normally do outside of the classroom. This principle is true for teaching in general, but it seems especially true for teaching Business English. The teacher needs to get to know the students, their line of work and design authentic tasks that mirror their daily activities. How well the course can actually cover all of these work-related tasks will, of course, depend on the context of teaching: tasks can be very specific when it comes to one-to-one students or a group of employees from the same department of a company. As for a Business English course in a language school, where students arrive from different walks of life, the tasks we design would need to be more general (e.g. holding meetings, writing business emails, going for a job interview).
3. Excuse me, Miss, are we learning British or American English?
This is a question I used to get on a regular basis from my high school students. Most General English coursebooks focus on one or the other, although nowadays listening materials tend to feature different accents. But how relevant is this question when it comes to doing business in English?
English is undeniably the lingua franca of the business world. Just a couple of situations that a BE teacher might be asked to help out with: A lawyer at a Hungarian energy company needs to talk to their Swiss clients about a tender. A German supply chain manager needs to write an email to the firm’s Czech supplier. There is a Zoom meeting between the Hungarian and the Indian team members of an American telecommunications company. You’ll notice that none of these actually involve native speakers, which gives rise to the question: is it necessary or even desirable to enforce, say, British English pronunciation, the use of country-specific idioms and figures of speech. Another interesting issue is how in an international business context non-natives often understand each other well but struggle more with natives due to the use of colloquialisms, their local dialect, and idiomatic language. This strengthens the idea that BE should be a more neutral form of English with an international standard.
What it all boils down to is that effective communication should take precedence over teaching fancy vocabulary or idiomatic language (unless of course the learners are interested in this).
4. Methodology – some adjustments
Once an English teacher knows how to teach, i.e. how to provide meaningful practice of vocabulary, how to set up a speaking task, how to present grammar and so on, they can easily apply this toolkit to a variety of teaching situations. But is this all we need to teach Business English? It might be worth exploring some particular approaches to teaching in more depth as they can yield better results and bring more student satisfaction in the Business English classroom.
One such approach is task-based learning. Here, the focus is on enabling students to successfully accomplish specific tasks and providing them with the language that they need for this. Taking such a view of language teaching seems particularly suitable to Business English as carrying out tasks are exactly what our students need the English language for. For instance, they might need to resolve the problems of dissatisfied clients over the phone or they can be asked to present their projects at meetings.
Finding out a bit more about the lexical approach might be worthwhile, too. This advocates teaching chunks of language (e.g. complete critical tasks, finish ahead of schedule, run a successful business) as opposed to isolated words (e.g. accounting, finance, lawyer), which can help higher level students with producing more sophisticated language. Another little trick to steal from the lexical approach is how students’ errors are viewed. It is suggested to offer upgrades and to reformulate students’ utterances instead of pointing out and correcting de facto mistakes. Afterall, saying “You said ‘go with them to court’. This is incorrect.” sounds quite discouraging and can easily lead to face-loss if there happens to be a higher ranking manager in the group. Offering a choice of different expressions, on the other hand, is more helpful, for example: “Let me give you some other options here. How about saying: ‘I’m going to file a lawsuit’ or ‘ I’m going to take them to court’?”
We will offer some practical tips on how to use these methods and many others in our future posts.
5. Grammar, vocabulary, listening, speaking…?
When we think about what we want to achieve with our lessons, we normally narrow our goals down to things like giving students practice in the use of the Present Perfect Continuous or enabling them to understand and use vocabulary related to travelling.
However, our Business English teachers at Angol Intézet agree on the importance of trying to make the tasks we use in the classroom reflect the tasks students perform in real life as much as possible. These shouldn’t simply be about practicing grammar, vocabulary, listening and reading skills etc. In real life, students will need to socialize with colleagues, analyse data, negotiate proposals or explain procedures. They need to know how not to sound stilted when speaking in English and how to keep it short and simple when writing for work. They need to know how to show that they’re listening to whoever is talking to them, how to interrupt someone and they need a certain degree of intercultural competence to be able to successfully communicate with foreign business partners. Therefore, focusing more on functions, communicative competence and zooming in on soft skills will provide students with more authentic and useful practice. An example of a lesson aim could be: giving students practice in using impact techniques when giving presentations or dealing with communication breakdowns in international meetings. All in all, in Business English, moving away from “traditional” lesson aims is often desirable.
A different teacher
Knowing how to present and practice language, how to adapt coursebooks, how to create personalized and engaging tasks are indispensable skills for all English teachers. But what else do we need? It’s as simple as ABC 🙂
Analysis
In many cases, students bring the materials, e.g. emails, presentation, the details of a meeting with a client or information about a phone call they’ll have to make. The teacher is the one who has to be able to work with these texts or situations: this means analysing communication and assessing students’ communicative needs. This can entail identifying elements of style, pinpointing how concise, direct or specific the text it is, which fixed expressions would be useful for the student to be able to (re)produce the text etc. And most importantly: how to practice it in the classroom, to be able to perform better at work. Analysing students’ needs (their communication needs, business needs, pedagogic needs) is an ongoing process and to be able to make informed decisions about our lessons, it needs to start before the actual course starts. In our future posts, we’ll give more tips about different ways of doing needs analysis.
Business
Naturally, the teacher needs a certain awareness of the business world and some relevant training skills. In 2022, the main skills for business are predicted to be collaboration, communication and creativity. Also, the dichotomy of virtual and in-person communication and the communication challenges of international work are probably here to stay, too. General Business English resource books and coursebooks can be helpful to catch us up to speed. Some of our favourites are like Market Leader, Business Insider, In Company, Business One-to-One, Heads Up – Spoken English for Business or Business Vocabulary in Use and 5-Minute Activities for Business English. There are also many great websites out there which can provide us with up-to-date information, materials and topics for our lessons. We warmly recommend CNN Business, Business Insider, Inc.com, Fast Company, Forbes, The Economist or Ideas.ted.com. It’s also worth joining online and offline communities for Business English teachers like IATEFL BESIG.
Curiosity
Comparing the dynamics of a General and a Business English classroom, we’ll find one striking difference: when it comes to Business English, the student knows more about the content, i.e. their work, and about their needs, i.e. what they need the English language for. They know what kinds of situations they face in their daily life and they usually know the jargon and the relevant concepts related to their line of work. And this is perfectly okay. In fact, it can be genuinely exciting for teachers to get a little glimpse into different professions. It creates an authentic information gap between teacher and student and allows for plenty of meaningful practice. Let’s say your student is a lawyer at a company: having her explain how, say, fixed and floating charges work provides opportunities for working with emergent language, extension, reformulation, error correction, upgrading etc. The key for the teacher is to be interested and willing to learn as there is a more symbiotic relationship between teacher and student.
Autonomy
To enable students to make the most of the lessons their role as the expert in their fields needs to be made explicit. Handing the control of the content of the lessons over to the student (partly or completely) is a huge step towards learner autonomy and towards a genuinely useful lesson. This can be further augmented if the teacher has some knowledge of how languages are learnt and how to help learners discover the best ways for them to learn. Look out for our future posts for practical tips about fostering learner autonomy!
Boost
Teaching is hard. It’s fun, but it’s hard. Coming up with fresh ideas for each lesson, being creative, supportive and energetic can, paradoxically, be highly motivating and incredibly exhausting at the same time. This is true for teaching Business English, perhaps even more so. Due to the nature of Business English, the teacher needs to come up with up-to-date and tailor-made materials for each student. To be able to keep doing this, and to enjoy it, one needs support in the form of a professional community. Colleagues at a language school, teacher development courses or online / offline communities of (Business) English teachers are therefore essential.
Credibility
Finally, when it comes to Business English professionalism and credibility are a must. This can come in many forms: qualifications, manner, knowledge, materials, communication etc. It might be a good idea to do some research, just like we would do before a job interview, to fulfill our client’s expectations.
To sum up, a teacher is someone who educates others so that they will be more successful in life. A trainer, on the other hand, is someone who helps people do a specific job or a task better (Frendo, p.5). Therefore, in Business English the teacher should provide training in the relevant communication skills required for learners to do these tasks effectively in addition to language teaching. For instance, when the student is preparing to give a presentation in English, the Business English teacher can give advice and provide some practice in using repetition or rhetorical questions to make an impact on the audience.
Conclusion
Maybe you’re planning to transition into teaching Business English or perhaps you’re already working for companies or have private students – either way, we hope you found some good tips in this post.
Finally, we would like to share some words of encouragement from our colleagues at Angol Intézet. We asked them what advice they would give to someone who is about to start teaching Business English for the first time. This is what they said:
“My advice would be to give the students control of the curriculum. Make their needs the focal point of whatever you decide to do in class.” (Tom Johnson)
“The best source of ideas and material for teaching is the client. This makes your teaching personalised and it is generally thought that personalised teaching increases learning.
Base your lesson plans on the real business tasks that the client does. This will make your teaching interesting and useful.” (David King)
“You don’t need to be an expert in your learners’ profession. You’re there to help them improve how they use English in their jobs, not to tell them how to do it. The learner’s field of work can be a knowledge gap you can exploit in the classroom for conversation as you can get them to explain to you what they do. Show an interest and ask plenty of questions. That being said, it never hurts to do just a little research about their profession/company, as this will help guide you in terms of what to ask them.” (Daniel Foyster)
We’ll be back with more teaching tips soon!
References
Frendo, Evan. (2005). How to Teach Business English. Pearson.
Phillips, Timothy. (2021, March 24.). What Comes After Coaching?. IATEFL BESIG. https://besig.iatefl.org/what_comes_after_coaching_followup/.
Powell, Mark. (2011). Dynamic Presentations. Cambridge.
