Preparing to Teach Business English- A Pre-Reading Guide for the LCCI CerTEB

Making the most of what you’ve got
Even if you don’t presently have any business students, it’s good to be familiar with as much business material as you can before the course. There are ways you can make use of this material even if you don’t have business students. Some business books are easily useable, as least as supplementary material, in a general English course. Two of these are International Express and Handshake.

Getting deeper
Although using Business materials is very useful, doing the LCCI/ ARELS course actually introduces you to a whole different philosophy of English teaching - the ‘client approach’. This approach differs most from the type of teaching you learnt on your CELTA when you are teaching in one-to-one situations, and the book “One to One” is a great introduction to this. ESP (English for Specific Purposes) also makes great use of this ‘client approach’, and in fact business English is just one branch of ESP. Therefore, the book “English for Specific Purposes” is full of useful ideas. More obviously relevant are books designed to tell you how to teach business, for example “The Teaching Business English Handbook”. An area you might want to look into if you haven’t already is that of the Lexical Approach, as it is something that has affected Business English teaching more than any other part of the profession. The classic books to read about this area are those by Michael Lewis.

Finishing off
The knowledge you gain from reading a book or two from the paragraph above and taking the course is easily enough to write the final course assignment, but as you have to write about needs analysis and course planning you can add a lot to your knowledge (and hopefully your assignment) by reading, or at least referring to, books such as “Planning Lessons and Courses”. Finally, if not at this point then certainly in your future teaching you will need a good business dictionary.