Tips for your tired salaryman classes

I recently had a class who rebelled when the manager tried to make them come to their English classes at the official starting time rather than whenever they had finished the work. The class is no more (and will be sadly missed, by me- I hope by them too!), but I say good on em for showing a bit of spunk. Half of them had had their gains in TOEIC score wiped out by getting a promotion and so being too busy that they couldn’t take anytime off before their exam, or even cut down on their unpaid overtime for a day, so we all fighting a losing battle anyway. My boss seems to take the very sensible attitude that such a class running for 5 years is five years of success rather than one week of faliure when good sense finally hit them, so I still feel partially qualified in passing on some techniques I have dealing with chronically knackered business classes:

- Lots of Business English games, especially ones that take the language they already know passively and give them an ability to use it. 

- Try to keep the mental load low for at least some of the activities. Stuff like testing each other on their verb tables can go down a treat, and while it isn’t a huge step towards teaching them to really speak English, it can’t hurt

-Loads and loads of revision, not just from previous lessons but also recycling the homework you just marked or testing something from the beginning of the lesson one more time

- Topics which are a complete escape from their lives, e.g. fantasy homes, celebrity gossip, travel, any cultural stuff about whatever they would consider an exotic country to be

- Even more than normal ESP classes, you need to show them that the English lessons are making their working life easier in some way in the near future. This usually means telephoning and emailing, but again as games games games games, in this case telephoning games and emailing games

- Travel English stuff is great for both of the above, in that it is a topic with a relaxing, positive fantasy element and it is something that could be useful for any student at all, even if they never use English now.

- If they have a big presentation or test coming up, it’s worth suggesting that a good night’s sleep is going to be at least as useful as more time slumped over their notes

This started out as an answer of mine to a thread on Rave Spelling’s ESL Au Lait.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 1st, 2007 at 1:48 amand is filed under Business English and ESP, TEFL, TESOL, Teaching English Abroad, Teaching English in Asia, Teaching English in Japan, Teaching in Japanese companies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.