Taking an interest in Business English and ESP

Most guides to teaching Business English start off by assuring the teacher that they don’t have to know anything about business to teach Business English- ‘You are not teaching them about business, you are teaching them how to speak about it’, or words to that effect.

Whilst this is true and is worth telling a teacher who is about to teach Business English or ESP for the first time, I think too many teachers hang onto this idea throughout their teaching careers, and never get to know anything about business or the other specialist areas of their students. Not only does this exclude them from teaching pre-experience ESP students who do need to learn about the concepts as well as the language (probably one of the biggest-growing market in EFL) but, for me, it also means they miss out on the chief reward of this type of teaching- really learning about something from your students that it would be difficult to learn elsewhere. It can, of course, be useful for your students and interesting for you if they explain their job and their sector in the simplest possible terms. However, unless you are the kind of person that loves arcane knowledge, if your first contact with the world of business is someone explaining the ins and outs of accountancy in their second language it is probably going to be enough to put you off for life. Anyway, you can still feign ignorance and get them to explain it in basic terms even if you’re an expert.

Doing vocabulary exercises or a reading from an EFL book is not generally the most stimulating way of introducing yourself to subjects like marketing theories either. So here are some suggestions of how to start taking an interest in what they do in a nice easy way, so that the next time you can ask about their jobs with genuine interest (and even some understanding). Most of the examples given here are for the world of business, but they are easily adaptable to other areas of ESP.

Read ESP
The first time I ever stopped in front of the Business section of a bookshop was after I started teaching Business English and I started to worry about my complete lack of knowledge of that field. I can’t say that first impressions were very reassuring, but I quickly spotted the best books to start with- the ones that look like paperback novels. Books on great business swindles, crimes and disasters are a good start as the best ones read like a thriller- and you don’t realise how much you learnt about banking when you were reading about money-laundering until you go back into class and what your students say starts to make sense.
Luckily, the last decade or two has been full of great business scandals (e.g. Nick Leeson) and business failures (e.g. boo.com).

If you don’t have time to read a whole book, then newspapers and magazines are the best bet. The Economist is great if you have any interest in politics or international affairs, but it’s fairly heavy and you can be happy if you manage to read 50 or 60% of it. A much lighter start is the Financial Times weekend edition, where there are even sports and leisure pages (always with a sneaky financial slant). Even better there is the annual Fortune list of the world’s richest people- something that almost everyone finds fascinating.

If you never even pick up a newspaper, try some business-related fiction. John Grisham often writes about the little guy against corporate America, and ends up giving as much detail on the corporation as he does on the hero. Other classic ones are any 1980’s novel about yuppies, e.g. Bonfire of the Vanities or even American Psycho. If you like self-help books, there is also a whole category of business books that are basically in this category- such as ‘Who Moved My Cheese’. There are of course endless biographies of famous businessmen, and many of them spend as much time on their colourful lives as their businesses, e.g. Richard Branson’s. And finally, there are lots of history books with a business bias, on stories like the South Seas Bubble.

Best of all, start with comics. The ‘Dilbert’ comic strips and books are, as far as I’m concerned, the funniest thing around- and again you hardly notice how much real business you are learning. They are also available (free) on the internet at www.dilbert.com

Watch ESP
More difficult to find, but you could also look out for films and TV series based around the world of business- the movie “Wall Street” being the classic example. The recent BBC comedy series ‘The Office’ and the American film ‘Office Space’ can work as less high-powered versions of the same thing.

Write ESP
More dedication needed for this one, but if you are tired of doing readings in class about industries that seem inherently boring, try researching a business that you are interested in and writing about it. If football is your thing, you will be surprised how much a text you write on the whole ‘industry’ throws up useful business vocabulary for any kind of student. The students can then recycle the language by telling you the similarities and differences between your chosen area (e.g. health foods, sailing holidays) and the one they work in.

Play ESP
If you are not ready to risk your house trading on the stock market as yet, you can play a version of Fantasy Football League with stocks and shares. You and your friends all have an imaginary $10,000,000 to invest and the person who has made the most out of it at the end of 6 months wins the real (but more modest) pot of money you’ve all put in. You’d be surprised how quickly you start talking like a Wall Street hot shot. Once you’ve tried it, you can also try it out on a class of students.

In summary, by making a little effort (and generally, the less of an effort it feels, the more you are likely to take it in and go onto pick up another book on the subject), you go a long way to making your Business classes more interesting for both you and your students. What’s more, but by showing your students you are making an effort to learn something you have a bit more moral weight when nagging them about doing their homework.

All these tips can also be great for students who need to learn as much about business as about English, for example a translator I taught recently who was learning things in English she had no idea about in Polish.

Suggested reading
Rogue Trader: How I Brought Down Barings Bank and Shook the Financial World by Nick Leeson ASIN: 0316518565 Boo Hoo: $135 Million, 18 Months. . . A Dot.Com Story from Concept to Catastrophe
by Ernst Malmsten ISBN: 0099418371 The Bonfire of the Vanities
by Tom Wolfe ISBN: 0553275976
American Psycho ISBN: 0679735771 by Bret Easton Ellis Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson, Kenneth H. Blanchard ISBN: 0399144463
Losing My Virginity: How I’ve Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way by Richard Branson ISBN: 0812932293
The Secret History of the South Sea Bubble: The World’s First Great Financial Scandal by Malcolm Balen ISBN: 0007161778

Article originally published in English Teaching Professional Magazine
Reprinted with permission of Keyways Publishing

(C) Alex Case/ Keyways Publishing