ESP needs

As far as teaching students who are working, I'm terribly disappointed with the published materials for English for Special Purposes (ESP). Our school wanted to start several various ESP programs and we did a review of all the books available.

Cambridge's Information Technology ESP book, embarrassingly, has vocabulary including for "floppy disk". It is typical of many books on the market. (1) Out of date information. These books get old and are not updated. (2) Out of touch. IT people nearly always have a good technical vocabulary and perhaps to a lesser extent so do other professionals.

Of all the ESPs the biggest one and the one that attracts the most efforts of publishers is Business English. Even with Business English it is difficult to find material that is truly suitable for office workers.

I am about to start another year of teaching at an American logistics company that has centers in over 40 countries. Here is a typical Email that represents the type of English they need. This is written by one of my next students there:

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Dear Mr. Cao(ABC Co.), Polly(DEF Ltd.), Charles(GHI Inc.) and Daniel(JKL),

Greetings from Susan Lau, MNO Guangzhou.

Per PQ's e-mail below, I believe you already come into production the Holiday POPs. As you know, MNO need to repack and allocate the POPs to more than 400 RST Stores in Mainland China.

Usually, we will do the following when POPs ETA MNO:
- Combine some POPs to one carton to save packaging materials. (e.g. We usually put the Translite, Standee and Hanging Mobile into one Standee wrap)
- Ask some Temp. Helper on the POP allocation(to reduce Over Time Pay for
Workers)
- Catch Normal Routing Delivery to DCs, then from DC to Stores(to save delivery cost)
- 2 days repack in SUMS for 400+ stores

Therefore, we need your cooperation to deliver the POPs to MNO on or before Dec. 27, 2004. Otherwise, some POPs will be delivered by Express mail, this will bring on high delivery cost.

Any query or comments please feel free to call me or send me an E-mail.

Many thanks!

Susan Lau
Manager Trainee - MNO(GZ)

BERL Services (Guangzhou) Ltd.

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Most business people have difficulty with basic English. Students should probably focus on basic English until the upper-intermediate level. At that point the technical vocabulary they need is often particular to their specific type of business and their particular company and it is unlikely that a business book will even come close to it.

What is the solution? Something the publishers have no interest in giving us.

The ultimate ESP teacher tool would be a computer program that drove a flexible template based course generator. It would be strong on basic functions and notions and grammar practice (as is needed in the sample above) and allow teachers to easily insert the vocabulary and themes needed by the ESP teacher.

Photo: My student, a manager of a cold storage logistics company, visiting one of the top supermarkets in the city with me, learning and practicing her English about...well, cold storage.

Business English or Office English - There is a BIG difference

A teacher asked: "Can anyone recommend some textbooks or references that I could use in class and what is the course structure for teaching Business Communication?"

A lot depends on your students and their level.

College/university students have little idea of what kind of business English they will need and they have little or no real knowledge of English in the work place. Publishers have rolled out tons of material for these types of students which cover such a wide spectrum of business subjects, everything from stock portfolios to business travel, to be of little specific good.

On the other hand, you will find that professionals, who are already working in a business, have already mastered the vocabulary of their business but not the grammar. Here are samples of actual work Emails that I collected when researching needs at three different companies:

TO A CUSTOMER: "As per your request, we offered 7-cup & 10-cup rice cooker, single & double burner. Please kindly see the attached to re-fresh your memory. You like our product, and want to mix container of rice cooker and burner. Our Manager agreed that you can mix 4 items, 7-cup & 10-cup Rice cooker, single and double burner in trial order."

TO A CHINESE COLLEAGUE IN AMERICAN COMPANY: "Please advise the factory must check for lose color stones, the customer is complain last orders 993105, 993106, 993107, 993109, 993110, 993111 most of them the color stones are lose, please make sure factory double check for lose stones on these present orders..."

TO A CHINESE COLLEAGUE IN AMERICAN COMPANY IN CHINA: "we certify blue card of OBA or QC for those who were on board this month as per the training flow.[OBA&QC duration of OJT(red cards) are 15 working days to 20 working days ] . However we will certify blue card within this week if they had ability to working on their station. If not certification of blue card will be postponed to end of OJT by trainers. The OBA persons total 8 in A shift. We will certify their blue card in this week if they were able to work absolute. I will certify those who am I follow up persons. You certify those who are you follow up persons."

This latter type of students, the professionals, need what I call "Office English" but there is as yet no such textbook. Such a textbook would guide the student in making formal and informal business requests, confirming and checking information, accepting and rejecting suggestions, etc. Failing an Office English textbook, some of these needs are covered in General English and General Business English textbooks.

Business English lessons for low level students? Don't do it

A teacher asks for some material to teach Business English to low intermediate students.

I suggest that it is not in the students' best interest to begin studying Business English at that level for two reasons:

1. They really should get grounded in some basic English before trying to learn a specialty English like Business English. About 95% of their communications will be basic verbs and basic vocabulary.

2. There are no Business English books that can give the students the help they need in basic English at a low intermediate level.

At best they can only learn a McEnglish. This is what I call the English that McDonald's order takers have around the world. Here in China you can ask the girl for a Big Mac, fries and Coke without any problem. However, if you ask her if she thinks it will rain today she is lost.

Giving a Business English too early makes the student aware of SOME business vocabulary at the expense of a broader grasp of the language.

A great general English book is New Interchange in 4 levels from 0-3. A good approach would be to get the student up to at least the level 2 (about mid-intermediate) and then instead of doing 3 with them it would be safe to introduce Business English.

There is a world of difference in teaching college/university students and business people or professionals. The first group is quite intrigued about business and are eager to learn it. I have even been asked by these students to teach more business and less English.

The second group deals with the language of their business constantly. They actually excel at all the little buzzwords and company language of their business. My Chinese Proctor and Gamble English students used to carry on whole conversations in English in their P&G lingo and I could hardly understand a thing. However, this group invariably needs help with basic vocabulary as well as the grammar patterns to create correct proper sentences.

For example, here is the last Email sample I received as part of my needs analysis of a logistics company where I have begun teaching. It is very typical:

"Pls refer to blw details,payment has been settled by our agent. Pls kindly arrange remit to head office asap TTL:USD141.00. Tks to release cargo accordingly."

I would say the key business vocabulary here is: details, payment, settled, agent, remit, head office, release cargo; all used quite well. However there are lots of grammar errors.

Business English for pre-employed students is much different than for students who are professionals.

Know your students, know your ESP

Mert Bland on developing English training for special purposes (ESP): "I always begin where the students are and work outward in a kind of spiral. Like, have each one describe what he does. Ask questions. Have him teach you what security and facilities maintenance are all about. He should know more than you."

Mert makes a good point here. It's very easy for the teacher to make wrong assumptions of what the students need. You should also ask your students for copies of their incoming and outgoing Emails so you can see what your students communicate about, what kind of language they use and what kind of errors they make. When I start a training I get 10 Emails from each student. I have collected thousands by now and have a pretty good insight into real business writing.

Many teachers think that the students need to expand their vocabulary in their professional field. However, I've found that professional vocabulary is one of the things they learn first while on the job and they are often more in need of improving their grammar to support their vocabulary. This is a big relief for the teacher who may not be conversant in their particularly technical field.

Lower level students will need more functional help, how to describe or plan certain actions; ie: planning the work schedule for security staff. Higher level students will not have much trouble with this but will need help in discussing concepts and ideas; ie: future trends in security and maintenance.

The best way to figure out what they need is, like Mert suggested, talk to them about their work. You could also ask for a tour of their facilities and this will give you lots of ideas of things to talk about with them or you can even help them learn how to do the tour in English.

One final thought is that in some cases it is best to not always fit the training too closely to their job. I was teaching Business English to some students from Caltex and found some Caltex materials and a video clip on the Internet. I formulated some lessons around this Caltex material which I thought would really hit the target of what the students need. I suppose it did but the students hated it. They told me they deal with Caltex stuff all week and they'd like to get their minds off work a bit when they studied English.