ESL School

... students in the same way as her general English class. In her view there was no difference. I wasn’t particularly surprised, it was an attitude I often met among my French colleagues but it had an unfortunate effect on the learners. Most of them were so hung about being unable to use the present perfect tense properly that they learnt nothing at all. So how do I think business English is different?

In fact it takes my five-module course to explain this in detail! But let me give two main reasons and in my next post I will put some more detail on it. The first reason lies in the needs of the learners. Working people want to use English as an effective tool in their businesses. They are not learning because they are particularly interested in the language and they want to have a quick return on the investment of their time and money. This means that the present perfect is largely an irrelevance. They get it wrong, so what? Ninety—nine times out of a hundred that will make no difference to the meaning they are trying to convey because there will be many other clues for their listeners. Of course, every learner would love to be error free but that is just not realistic. And, my goodness, native speakers make plenty of mistakes themselves.

That brings me on to reason two. As these learners have specific needs, we concentrate far more on effective communication than on the nuts and bolts of grammar. Inevitably we feed them lots of useful vocabulary and idioms; we focus on the business activities that they carry out on a daily basis and help them improve their performance. All this entails creating a course in which we sift all the possible components to find the essential items that our learners need. Had we but world enough and time, of course we would pay attention to the fine details but we just don’t.

Concentrating on communication paradoxically also means widening the syllabus in some ways. We need to understand how others try to manipulate us through their use of language, in other words they use language as a special kind of behaviour. And we need to understand the intercultural implications of communications in international business. Inevitably too we need to look at new technology in international business. Netmeetings, email, and Internet advertising now play an important part in global enterprise. This all impacts on the way business uses English. I had never thought, for example, about the possibility of English pop songs imitated and broadcast on You Tube as a means of advertising. Yet this is exactly what one of my former clients, French watchmaker LIP, has done: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dVC1Pdc2BQ/.