Hi Zira,

You have asked some very important questions here, and this has been a problem in naming courses at different centres and institutions. Are they offering ESP courses? English for business courses or Business English courses? The enigma here causes confusion for learners/customers and tutors who have to meet the customers' needs.

I believe that Business English is aimed at learners whose first language is not English and would like to enhance their language and communicative skills in order to communicate efficiently and fluently in business contexts and situations. Topics included in a Business English course may include areas as negotiations, meetings, telephoning as well as writing discourse as emails and business reports, this is in addition to technology, marketing, manufacturing, management, finances, and business services.

As for ESP, it aims at preparing learners for real-world demands. For example, my first job as a lecturer at Cairo University, I taught several ESP courses in Medicine, Engineering, Economics, and Media for undergraduate students. These were preparatory courses focusing on developing communicative competence in the specific field in which words and sentences are learnt, the subject matter discussed, all related to that particular field or discipline in which the students will specialise and obtain a degree.

Most ESP and BE teachers have a language teaching background and do not have first-hand experience of the content and context of other disciplines or business. This is why there are courses aiming at developing teachers competence in Business and specific fields, i.e. the new DELTA modular format where teachers choose to specialise in one area or another.

There's a great role for Business English at ESP courses: People can become proficient in an academic field, very competent in the subject matter but lack the skills s/he may need to communicate in life. To give an example, there are lots of soft skills courses introduced at medical and pharmaceutical colleges such as sales, interpersonal, leadership, teamworking and presentation skills. Physicians and pharmacists deal communicate with people on daily basis; they won't be using the jargon learnt and acquired, they need to narrow the gap between them and their customers whether they are patients or business associates. Thus,an ESP  course, in my view point,  void of any soft skills will be sterile due to the  world turning into a small village where cultural awareness, diversity and mutuality are integral in any work field.

Looking forward to your feedback and comments.

Sahar

Hi, Zira!

You have asked a tricky question indeed, and I wonder if anyone could give you an exact answer to that. I will try to reply to the best of my knowledge. BE has originated from ESP, just like EAP, but because of the vastness of the topics, EAP and BE took separate paths from ESP. That's why when we talk of BE, the thought of ESP comes to mind. At the same time, if we look at some specific narrow courses, I think it could be quite appropriate to call them ESP courses, even in application to BE. As far as I understand BE is still considered to be a part of ESP on a large scale, though it is regarded separately now. I think in general ESP is more specific and more suited to particular courses, whereas BE is growing more and more as a separate discipline. As Martin Hewings writes in ESP Journal, "The rapid growth of courses in Business English around the world is well documented..." (http://www.esp-world.info/Articles_3/Hewings_paper.htm)

Personally I would not say Business English is aimed at language learners; Business Communication, for example is the course which is taken worldwide and gains more and more popularity, and what is important, it is much better developed still for the native speakers than non-native ones. In 2001 I visited Virginia School of Economics in the USA (Virginia Commonwealth University) with the Open World Russian Leadership Program, and I was amazed how much importance the course of Business Communication had there - no future economist graduated there without it, without, let's say, a tutorial in giving presentations, and so on. Just for comparison: in my city in Russia we started such a course only in 2006 on the experimental basis. Business Communication is crucial for any country, whether an English-speaking one or not, and it is gaining more and more importance because of globalisation.

I hope that could clarify something to you, though as I have already said, this question does not seem to have clear answers. I wonder what could others say about this tricky issue? 

Anastasia

Mildly off-topic here, but I like the old maxim "all ELT is ESP". I don't have a lot of experience teaching kids, but I bet when we finally drop the "general English" goal and let each 15-year-old student identify their own "specific purpose" we'd have better success.

 Back to BE and ESP: Sahar makes a great point about soft skils and ESP. Maybe we should rename that "professional English" and have it be a common element in any ESP course.

Dear All

In my view, BE is an ESP. For eg. BE is for the business students,Technical English is for the engineers, thus English has been fulfilling the specific purposes of study.

Samjhana

Dear Natasha and Samjhana,

Thank you for participating in the discussion. Personally I can't help agreeing with you on the matter that BE is an ESP, because it serves the specific purposes of study. At the same time English for Businesspeople does sound awkward, because the umbrella term Business English includes the notion of such courses.

Looking forward to hearing more from you! You are welcome to share your experience in our forum!

Anastasia

 Dear all,

I did not want to come across as advocating that BE is not ESP. ESP is a much wider area and BE is a rather broad area in its own right so ESP needs further branching and BE did obiously gain its marked position.  

Maybe this question of calling BE - English for business people could be raised in BESIG yahoogrup which is rather active in discussions. Naming BE English for business people would be limiting it unfairly in scope to my mind

Natasha