Unexpected phone calls

Here´s an idea for a lesson on telephoning that I successfully used with a group of managers in a logistics company this week.

 

 

It seems that the majority of calls that in-work business English learners have to answer are unexpected, and what they need is, therefore, not only the language of strategies, but also strategies for dealing with these unexpected calls. The aims of this lesson are to engage learners in a dialogue about the unexpected calls they receive and how they deal with them and then for them to take part in simulations of unexpected phone call scenarios and possibly to practise how well they can spontaneously react to an unexpected phone call from their partner.

 

1. Write UNEXPECTED PHONE CALLS in the middle of  the board or flipchart and ask the learners what that means to them. Make it clear before they respond that you´re talking about unexpected calls at work only. What is an unexpected phone call? Which phone calls are expected and which are unexpected.

 

2. Draw four lines coming out from UNEXPECTED PHONE CALLS in the centre and write these headings at the end of them: 1) How often? 2) Who are they from? 3) What do they want? 4) Strategies. Ask the learners to discuss their answers to these questions in pairs and then feedback to the rest of the group. (1. How often do you get unexpected phone calls? 2. Who are they from? 3. What do the callers want? 4. Do you have any strategies for dealing with unexpected calls?)

 

3. Write up the learners´ responses on the board or flipchart during the feedback/ group discussion phase. Ask the learners to be a bit more specific or give some more details, if necessary.

 

4. Now ask the learners to choose one person (or type of people, e.g. suppliers) who they get unexpected calls from, one thing that this person could want from them when they call them unexpectedly, and one strategy they could use to deal with the call effectively and to do this in cooperation with a partner.

 

5. The learners then prepare for a role-play based around the scenario they have chosen in pairs.

 

6. The learners perform the role-plays either individually with their partner, in front of the rest of the group or both. Alternatively, the learners could create an outline of a telephone conversation within the context they´ve and then pass this on to another pair. In this case the unexpected element would really be there because the learners wouldn´t know for sure what scenario they were going to get and they could then role-play it as spontaneously as possible as a test of their ability to deal with the unexpected and stay cool under pressure!

English for SAP

This English for SAP exercise has its origins in a lesson I had with two A2 level in-company learners. One is the quality assurance manager and the other is technical manager in a factory in Bavaria. They both initially struggled with English learning and were resistant to anything which appeared to be grammar. Their level was relatively low when they started the course, but they actually had a lot of English input to deal with at work, so they were being exposed to a lot of English, but they weren´t really able to understand, process and respond to it in English themselves.

After going through some typical A2 business English topics at the start of the course: introducing yourself, talking about your daily routine and the organisation of your company and looking at company history to practise the past simple, one day the participants had a stroke of brilliance. They told me that the SAP programme they had to use at work was an English version of the software and they sometimes had difficulties understanding the terminology it uses. They suggested that one of them log on to the computer in our training room and show me their SAP programme, which we did. We then made a list of all the vocabulary in the programme which they thought was important, this came to about fifteen items. I then asked them to tell me:

• which words they´d seen or heard before
• which words they could translate into their first language (German)
• which words they could use in a sentence or give an example or definition for

From this sorting exercise came an exercise designed to review and consolidate their grasp of some of the words they thought were important and knew the translation of in their first language (or at least they knew it after our discussion of SAP vocabulary in that lesson), but which they couldn´t use in a sentence or give an example of. We did this exercise the following week.

The participants responded well to this activity because it helped them practise some of the language that they need to be able to use in their daily business and because it was derived from a source that they use while doing their daily business.  It gave them a context in which they could see the vocabulary and inspired the learners to create their own example sentences or definitions for other words used in SAP.

You can download the exercise here.

Why I´m looking forward to the IATEFL BESIG Summer Symposium

This way to the Eiffel Tower!

In just over a month´s time, Business English professionals will be converging on Paris. Some will have taken the Metro to ParisTech in the Butte aux Cailles area of Paris, which feels a little bit like a small French village tucked away within the capital. Others will have taken a taxi and then a plane and then a train and then the Metro, having travelled a much greater distance to make it to the symposium they´re all attending. And why are they making such a big effort to go to this symposium, the IATEFL BESIG Summer Symposium, which takes place on June 16th? Why will I be getting up at 5.30am and spending 6 hours sitting in a train on my way to Paris? Well, in fact, there are many reasons why I´m going to be doing this, but here are 7 of them:

1) David Crystal will be giving the plenary, need I say more! The living legend, ELT guru and patron of IATEFL that is David Crystal will be talking about English and the internet.

2) Coaching: Michelle Hunter, Alison Haill and Natalie Gorohova will be giving talks and workshops on this topic, one which I´ve become more interested in recently. Coaching skills can help us become more effective business English teachers and give us a new skill to add to our repertoire, which we can then offer to clients.

3) English for Banking and Finance: Marjorie Rosenberg, who is one of the leading experts on English for Banking and Finance will be talking on this topic, one which I´m interested to delve deeper into after having recently started teaching a one-to-one course with  a student, the Head of Finance in a multinational company, who wants to focus on Financial English.

4) Selling Yourself:  Mike Hogan and Bethany Cagnol will be passing on some tips about how to maximise your income as a freelance business English trainer, and get more interesting and varied work offers. As a freelance trainer myself, of course, this is an important topic for me. As much as I love business English, it´s also my job and selling myself is something that I have to do just about every day, in some shape or form.

5) Using Corpora: Evan Frendo is a fantastic speaker who has (quite literally) written the book on business English teaching. I´m very interested in English as a Lingua (ELF)  and corpora building, as I believe it really is where the future of effective BE teaching lies. I know that corpora building is a good way of composing a bank of relevant vocabulary for learners, but I´d really like to know more and find out how I can actually use it in my courses.

6) Task-based Learning: Eric Halvorsen will be giving a talk on task-based learning, which is an area that I became interested in after finding out more about it on the CertIBET course I´m currently doing. I know that Eric did his MA TEFL dissertation on this subject and has come up with some interesting and useful for ideas for implementing task-based learning in business English courses.

7)Myths and Controversies in BE teaching:  Chia Suan Chong  is a great presenter and I´m sure she´ll give an interesting talk on recent issues in business English. It´s always good to keep abreast of what other people in the field are doing and thinking about and to decide where you stand on these issues.

So far I´ve only talked about the sessions I´d like to attend, but some of the best reasons for going to conferences are often apparent before, in between or after them. The last time I attended an ELT conference, which was the IATEFL Annual Conference in Glasgow at the end of March, I had some excellent conversations with other delegates about, amongst other things:

• a possible gap in the market for training in native speakers on how to effectively deal with their non-native speaker colleagues in English
•  whether or not Poland should join the euro zone
• what it´s like to do the Trinity College, London Certificate in International Business English Training
•  the TIRF English for the Workplace study
• what it takes to become an ELT materials writer
• how to set up an English Language Teachers Association
•  the possibilities for doing a train the trainer course in intercultural communication
•  the respective advantages and disadvantages of being an embedded trainer, as opposed to being a freelance trainer

These face-to-face conversations with other trainers and professionals within the field of business English are invaluable to me as a business English trainer, without them I would probably just plod along, teaching the same lessons I´ve been teaching for the last 5 years, in the same way, I wouldn´t have as many resources and ideas at my disposal to meet my learners´ needs as I do, my career might not be as lucrative as it is, and I wouldn´t have the relationships with other trainers I have and which are such a great source of support and encouragement to me as I travel from company to company on my own from Monday to Friday!

So, for all of the above reasons—and the fact that I´ll be doing a workshop on how to adapt authentic materials for classroom use—I´ll be at the IATEFL BESIG Summer Symposium in Paris on June 16^th. Paris isn´t such a bad place to spend the weekend either!

Keep an eye on the events page of the BESIG website for further information about the symposium.

How to write a meeting agenda

A couple of weeks ago the two branch managers I teach at a logistics company, told me that they needed to write an agenda for a meeting they were hosting (in English) with other branch managers from a range of European countries. They asked if we could focus on this topic in our next English lesson, the following week. I said, “Of course, we can do that.” I´d never taught a lesson on this topic before since most of my participants have previously been employees on a lower rung of the corporate ladder doing administrative and controlling work or manual work in the production. There must be some material out there for this topic though, I thought, there has to be.

After scouring all the course books I own (admittedly, my selection is of average size, far from comprehensive) and the internet for help, I found next to nothing which I could use to help my learners effectively write an agenda in English for their meeting, so I decided to put something together myself. My web search wasn´t entirely fruitless, however, and I found a text helpfully entitled “How to write a meeting agenda.” on the Microsoft training website. The text was far from perfect though. The learners are both high B1s and would have struggled with some of the more complicated parts of the text, so I simplified them and generally did my best to make the English more learner-friendly in my version. I also added questions for them to discuss their answers to before they read the text to warm them up and get them thinking about meeting agendas. I then decided to give them a vocabulary challenge by blanking all but the first letter or first two letters of the some of the key vocabulary for meetings and agendas, and asking them to complete them. This makes it a more active exercise since the learners have to recall and use vocabulary and it exposes possible lacks in their meetings vocabulary repertoire which we can then work on together.

Before we looked at the text together though, I brought in some examples of meeting agendas that I have in English and they brought in some examples that they had and we evaluated them together: What points do they include? How effective are they? Is there anything missing?

The learners responded well to the exercise: they said it gave them just what they needed, it got them talking, got them thinking and they began to activate their passive vocabulary and learn some new words which will prove useful to them during their upcoming meeting. We spent most of our 90 minute lesson on this activity and then followed it up in the next lesson by actually writing the agenda. If your learners don´t have a meeting agenda to write in real-life right now, then you could still do this follow-up activity in the form of a simulation based on a meeting context which you´re participants have recently had.

If anyone has or knows of any other resources for writing meeting agendas, I would very much like to know about them.

You can download the worksheet here.

Dr. Fons Trompenaars on Corporate Culture: A lesson based around a video

This is a plan for a 90 minute lesson with high B2 or C1 learners, created for an in-company course. I would recommend using this lesson plan with participants who have regular contact with colleagues, customers, suppliers, partners from other countries, since its aims are:

• to encourage the learners to reflect on the essential components of their own corporate culture and how that compares and contrasts with corporate cultures in other cultures or geographical areas
• to develop strategies for minimising conflict potential and establishing successful working relationships between themselves and business partners from those different culture and geographical areas.

Two different sources inspired me to write this lesson. The first was a task I completed as part of the CertIBET (Certificate in International Business English Training) course that I´m currently taking part in with The Consultants-E. The aim of the task was to read about the ideas of a range of thinkers and decide which one was the most interesting for me. I chose Fons Trompennars and his ideas about intercultural communication because as a British person living in Germany, I´m frequently confronted by culture contrasts myself and I´m interested in explaining and trying to come to terms with them. I also just found his ideas interesting! My CertIBET tutor, Carl Dowse, then posted this video of Fons Trompenaars talking about corporate culture:

The second source of inspiration was a group I teach. They´re German scaffolding specialists who are currently working on a project for the Queen´s diamond jubilee in collaboration with a British company which provides seating for events. They were having big communication problems with their British partners! I asked them to elaborate on what was going wrong and found out that they were communicating in a very direct manner and the British partners had perceived this directness as impolite and unfriendly. There was also the matter of timekeeping: the Germans expected deadlines to be met and that they would be given ample time to meet them, whereas the British wanted to take a more flexible approach to time and had asked the Germans to complete work for them at short notice. This didn´t please the Germans and they weren´t afraid to let the British know about it. My group seemed to lack sufficient awareness of the fact that their British colleagues had a different way of working than they did and they expected them to conform to their German way of doing things, which, of course, was never going to happen.

This lesson was written with these learners in mind and in the hope that it would reduce the conflict potential between thems and their international business partners next time around and, therefore, help them to establish more successful working relationships, which can only be beneficial to their organisation.
You can download the lesson plan here.
Here´s the link to the YouTube video.

Cartoons and Engineers

You may think that cartoons and engineers don´t mix, but what if I told you that cartoons can be a useful and fun way for engineers to practise their Technical English. No, I´m not talking about Tom and Jerry or any of their animal friends, but cartoons that inventors have drawn to visualise crazy machines and contraptions.

There´s one thing that these contraptions all share: they use very complex processes to produce absurdly simple results, for example, cleaning a person´s mouth with a napkin at the dinner table.

Rube Goldberg, 1915
Source:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Professor_Lucifer_Butts.gif

A lot of the famous cartoonists who have drawn these cartoons were working in the early years of the twentieth-century, when many people felt that there was too much technology and you could buy a contraption to do any job you needed doing. Maybe at the start of the twentieth-first century we sometimes get that feeling, too.

British cartoonist Heath Robinson´s cartoons became so famous that “Heath-Robinson contraption” came into official (English) dictionary use around 1912. American Rube Goldberg was also drawing a lot of crazy and pointless inventions at around the same time.

Nearly a hundred years later, competitions still take place worldwide in which participants, who are usually engineers or engineering students, compete to see who can build the best complex machine designed to complete a simple task.

Image: Rube Goldberg Competition by jclarson
http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnandvanessa/393718772/sizes/o/in/photostream/

Getting back to Technical English, I have used some of Heath Robinson´s and Rube Goldberg´s cartoons in the Technical English courses that I teach and my learners always enjoy working with them. We have a laugh at how silly the inventions are and it gets them producing a lot of good Technical English because they really want to be able to talk or write about the processes they can see. I use them to help my learners practise describing and explaining a technical process, which is a useful skill for people working in technical fields to have.

How to use cartoons in your technical English courses: 

If you search for Rube Goldberg or Heath Robinson images online (for example, on Google Images), you can see some of their cartoons. Just choose one that you like.

1. The first thing you should do is ask your learners to brainstorm a list of the English words for the items they can see in the cartoon, using a dictionary to help them, if necessary. In the cartoon above, for example, the objects you can see include: a cigar lighter, a pail, a rocket, some seeds and a perch. The learners should know the words for the objects before they start to describe the process.
2.  Next, the learners need to think about which actions have to happen for the machine to function and which English verbs they can use to describe these actions, for example, pull, push, ignite, tilt.
3. They also have to think about the English words they can use to describe a process; they need some sequencers, for example: first, then, next, after that, and finally.
4. Then you need to focus on the English they need to explain cause and effect in processes, for example, thereby moving the …, this causes the … to …, and as a result.
5. Now the learners are ready to write a short text which describes and explains the process they see in the cartoon. They could write the description down or they could record themselves talking about it using a voice recording app on their smartphone or a voice recording tool like Audioboo that you can find online, and then listen back to it.
6. This could also be done as a pair or groupwork activity: one of the learners could describe and explain the process to the other person (without showing him/her the cartoon) and they could then draw a sketch of the invention on paper. You can compare your partner´s drawing with the original. Then you can change roles and do it the other way round.
7. As a follow-up activity, learners could follow the same steps to describe and explain a process you know about from their work.

Ten DOs and DON´Ts for Workplace Visits In-Company

http://www.flickr.com/photos/s_husso/2385967650/sizes/m/in/photostream/

DO

1) Show an interest in what you´re being shown. Much of the successful relationship-building you´ve done with the participants by initiating and going on a workplace visit with them will be wasted, if they think their work bores you.

2) Be aware of the workplace dynamics going on in the workplaces you visit and where your participants fit into them. They could be the boss of the employees you see as you´re walking around, in which case they´ll want to appear completely in control of the situation, or one of those employees could equally be their boss, in which case they may be keen to impress him or her.

3) Encourage the participants to be tactile and pick up their products and show you how they work (where this is appropriate and not prohibited, of course). The participants usually want to do this anyway and it tends to make the experience more memorable for them.

4)  Assume the role of an educated and curious “visitor” to the industry which your participants work in. You´re intelligent, of course, but you most likely don´t have the same level of specific industry or product knowledge that your participants do—you can use this to your advantage though, and encourage the participants to explain what is going on in and how things work in as much detail as possible. In my experience, participants enjoy the feeling of being in the driving seat and making the temporary transition from learner to teacher.

5) Get maximum value out of the visit by preparing the learners for it, e.g. by working on vocabulary specific to their workplaces and on language for giving a tour and explaining how things work prior to the visit, and also debrief them on it afterwards. Give them language feedback, encourage them to reflect on their performance and, together with them, identify areas that they need to work on in order to improve their ability to present their workplace in English—this might be: more industry-specific vocabulary or introducing more variety in the range of verbs they use to describe processes, rather than just using “bring” or “go” all the time.

DON´T

6) Expect participants to be able to comfortably give you an explanation of how a process works if you´re standing in a spot where noise levels are high, or expect the other participants to be able to hear what they have to say, for that matter.

7) Assume that the participants will be taking notes on everything that´s going on and recording all the new vocabulary which is being activated. A better strategy is to assign note-taking or vocab. recording on one particular machine, process or area to each participant and concentrate on doing the bulk of the note-taking for the purposes of language feedback and vocabulary collection yourself. A clipboard or folder to lean on and some kind of shorthand, which you´ll later be able to make sense of later on, are a great help here.

8) Only do workplace visits near the start of a new course or while you´re new to the group. Why not continue to do them at regular intervals—not every week, but certainly every few months—so that the connection between the English course and their workplace remains present in their minds

9) Forget to clear your visit with other people in the company, where this is necessary of course. You, as a teacher, may need special authorisation to enter certain parts of the company or the visit may have to be agreed to by a supervisor or the responsible person from the HR department—you don´t want to get yourself, and potentially your participants, into hot water by not playing by the company rules.

10) Leave any of the participants out. Make sure that if your participants come from different departments or work in different areas of the factory, they all get the chance to give the group a tour of their workplace at some point. They will then all have a sense of being involved in the process and will not merely be passively, but also actively involved in it.