Archive for the ‘Teaching Business English and ESP’ Category

Hopefully it’s just Mayday bank holiday rather than my lack of effort TEFLtasticwise recently that has seen a sudden drop in my number of views, but if only to make myself feel better I thought I’d give a list of where I’ve been making much more effort elsewhere, with links:

TEFL.net Idea Thinktank

15 fun ways to switch students onto graded readers

15 fun gapfill tasks

15 fun job application practice tasks- CV writing, cover letter, interview practice, HR vocabulary etc.

TEFL.net articles

15 common misconceptions about Business English and ESP

15 cultural differences in the Japanese classroom

15 more cultural differences in the Japanese classroom

15 criteria for a good cultural training lesson

15 more criteria for good cultural training lesson

15 important cultural differences in the classroom

15 more important cultural differences in the classroom

Onestopenglish (Macmillan) articles

Motivating teachers whose Business English students miss class

UsingEnglish articles for teachers

Why your students overuse their dictionaries- with solutions

70 characteristics of a good grammar presentation- possibly the longest article on this subject ever!

Why your students don’t want to do pairwork- with solutions and some pondering about whether they might not sometimes be right

Why your students still make mistakes with grammar they know well- with solutions and a call to relax when there are no solutions

The advantages and disadvantages of peer observations- with how to exploit the advantages and avoid the disadvantages

Things to put in a Self-Access Centre or Student Library- with tips on how to do it on the cheap

Why do my students question me?- with solutions

Why your students have problems with listening comprehension- with solutions

UsingEnglish.com articles for students (teachers might also want to have a look at what I am writing about them)

Why does my teacher make me read silently?

Why doesn’t my teacher correct all my mistakes when I’m speaking?

Why does my teacher make me learn the phonemic script?

UsingEnglish photocopiable PDF worksheets

Travel English pairwork B and V

Business and technical English easily confused words

CAE Reading Part Two match the quotes

TEFLtastic worksheets (pain in the arse to print out but worth the effort)

English for job applications/ HR worksheets

Cultural training worksheets for EFL classes

Requests and offers functional language review

The Roots of Medical English LP and 4 worksheets

And that’s it for TEFL stuff. The other thing I’ve been busy with is my wedding speech for the day after tomorrow, which could well mean that May will be an even less busy month in TEFLtasticland. Anyone fancy writing a guest piece or feeding me a story to keep the 1700 viewers I get on a good day entertained until I get back into the flow? If so, try the “Contact me” link on the right…

Having found out from the book “English for Specific Purposes” by Keith Harding that ESP has spawned a whole raft of lovely acronyms such as EAP, EBP, EMP, EOP, EPP, EST, EVP* and also the disparaging one for General English of ENOP (English for No Obvious Purpose), I thought it was time to brush the dust off the Alternative ELT Jargon Dictionary and set off in defence of General English.

Although I have a fair number of ENOP students in both my Business and General English classes, lots of my non-Business students have very specific purposes indeed. Here are a few acronyms to make those purposes look a bit more important and so get them the respect they deserve:

EKTRP- English for Killing Time after Retirement Purposes

EACRP- English for Avoiding Cultural Restrictions Purposes- like Japanese women who can only debate in English because the feminine forms of their own language are so weak it is impossible to compete with men

ESAP- English for Smart Arse Purposes- such as showing off the latest useless idiom they have learnt

EEP -English for Extramarital Purposes

EGSP- English for Gaijin Stalking Purposes/English for Giri Stalking Purposes- this one works for women whose list of needs in a relationship are topped by “blond hair” in both Spain and Japan

ENP- English for Nationalistic Purposes- such as explaining to foreigners why they should never criticise your country

EBP- English for Babysitting Purposes

ETP- English for Therapeutic Purposes- because your GABA teacher is the only person who will listen to your problems

ECP- English for Chaperone Purposes- for Turkish university students who are only allowed to stay out past the curfew of their halls and meet people of the other sex by signing on for English classes

And a couple which give a more realistic idea of what Business English and ESP classes turn out to be:

EAWP- English for Avoiding Work Purposes- coming to class might be the only chance they have for a one hour lunch break

EBP- English for Budgetary Purposes- for companies where the only way to give staff training on the cheap is to choose English lessons rather than the IT training they really need (more…)

“Native-Japanese speakers taking the paper-based Test of English as a Foreign Language, or TOEFL, scored lower than students from China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, South Korea and Vietnam in 2007. Even North Koreans scored higher.”

From the famous Japan analyst William Pissant.

To which my reply is- (more…)

As a blogger and writer of articles on the internet whose technical knowledge stops at Word, as usual I feel half chuffed at churning out so many articles, including a good one here and there, and half guilty at creating so much work for those who can name a programming language more recent than BASIC. So, with many thanks to the tech sorts who made this possible and without further ado, here are the new bits and pieces on the web that I’ve been associated with:

The TEFL.net review pages I edit now allow comments on any of the titles reviewed there, which is a fabulous idea which I wish had been mine.

On TEFL.net too, there is a new Idea Thinktank of practical teaching games etc, on which I have about 12 (!) articles including 15 Fun Things to do with a Whiteboard (yes, that’s a whiteboard rather than an interactive whiteboard- showing my age??) and the 15 Most Fun Pronunciation Games.

As if that wasn’t enough, I’ve also got some slightly more weighty ones up on the rejigged TEFL.net TEFL Articles Page, including Easy Ways to Improve Your TEFL Career.

And on Usingenglish.com in March:

Election- Second Conditionals speaking practice

101 IELTS Speaking Part Two Tasks about sports and hobbies

Why your students speak L1 in class

Why your students don’t do their homework

101 IELTS Speaking Part Two tasks about people, places, actions, things and times

Setting up workshops for teachers

Business English tense review

Business English silent letters and syllables

The language of trends spot the difference

I also had a review of a couple of BULATS books out in MET magazine this month, should you have a copy handy and fancy a look.

“Hi Alex

Just been looking at the worksheets and lesson plans you´ve reproduced.  You´ve certainly been busy, great work I will be using quite a lot of them.  I was checking through to see if you had any specific to Legal English, as I am currently teaching a group of five lawyers in Spain.  If you have anything or know any good links to other websites I´d really appreciate your help.

Thanks very much.

Cheers
Sarah”
———-

“Hi Sarah
 
Thanks for your nice comments. I’m afraid I’ve never taught lawyers (the nearest I got was immigration officers), but do you mind if I post your email to see if any other readers have suggestions?
 
Thanks
 
All the best
 
Alex”
———

“Hiya

Thanks for your quick response.  Yes, you can post my email if you like.

saludos
Sarah”

—

So, any help at all gratefully received by me and Sarah. Please! Pretty please!

callipygian:

(more…)

To make up for all the navel gazing recently, have decided to give the public what it wants for once. And what the public wants is TEFL sex!

That first paragraph should get some nice bizarre Google searches coming my way, but actually I’ve already done that topic to death (really!), so I’ll instead be expanding on the most popular recent post, which was on writing the perfect CV and cover letter for a TEFL teacher. Now we have, for your delight and delectation:

The perfect CV and cover letter for an EFL exam class teacher

The perfect CV and cover letter for a TEFL young learners teacher

The perfect CV and cover letter for an EFL manager

The perfect CV and cover letter for a teacher trainer

And last and (possibly) least:

The perfect CV and cover letter for a Business English teacher

In answer to my own question, I’m actually quite happy being a TEFL pleb again after trying teacher training and what have you, which is perhaps why I am the only person who will give advice to others on how to get into it as I’m not competing with you for the jobs…

It might have just been an excuse to quit my gym session early, but got a sudden urge to sort TEFLtastic out. That means that my new favourite site has helped me convert all the Medical and Pharmaceutical worksheets into easily printable pdf files, and I’ve stuck them in as Word documents so you can correct my spelling mistakes before you use them as well.

Now that you can download Word documents and make all the changes you like, I’ve also started including stuff that is the raw material for a good Medical English lesson but that I didn’t get to make into a good worksheet before all my Medical English classes disappeared:

More words from Greek

More medical word roots

And don’t forget to have a look at my own personal Usingenglish page for new stuff on there:

Somewhere along the way I have come up with idea of looking at games in the classroom in a completely different way, by brainstorming games for language points that absolutely all kinds of students need and so not dividing them up by age or level. The idea behind this is:

􀁺 it can free you up to brainstorm a similar broad range of activities for the classes and language points you need to prepare for

􀁺 it can help you bring a range of learning styles into classes where they are usually neglected, e.g. logic puzzles with younger students or physical activities with advanced adults

􀁺 it can illustrate how cross-fertilization of ideas across different areas of teaching and from outside teaching can be a great source of ideas (more…)

“Economists use decimal points to prove they have a sense of humour” (more…)