Hi Anstasia,

That's a brilliant idea to share our experiencies and agony aunts :-)

Well, my school used to offer a wide range of Buisness English programmes and courses, but since 2001, they have decided to focus more on teaching the language of business rather than the skills. We have three types of courses:

English for Buisness. These are 3 bands: Intermediate, Upper Intermediate and Advanced, and each band has 4 levels each lasts for two months. Every two months, students have a different teacher who is either CELTA or DELTA qualified. There are 6 classes of this type and there's a  business course book used for each band.

Skills courses. We are currently offering 3 skills courses: Business writing, Report writing and Presentation skills. We used to offer other courses like Train the trainer, Assertiveness, Leadership, Marketing and Management but these were dropped for various reasons. These courses last for 16 hours, and even though they had some skills in the past, they had been written to focus mainly on the language rather than the skills.

Corporate courses. These are tailor made courses to meet the needs of our corporate clients. They have a mix of E4B and Skills. Sometimes, an online module is included using moodle but not for all clients.

The school has 25 classrooms, 5 of which only have IWBs and a multimedia room which is to be shared among all teachers. It's not necessarily that teachers of the above courses have an IWB room, but they have access to a normal TV/ video, CD player and overhead projector.

 Over the last 12 years, I have created several Business courses, most of which are not for my school as this does not meet the overall objectives. I design and deliver courses with very much business content and practices, rather than language. This is why I find myself  occasionally handcuffed when I teach in my school. I enjoy the business discussions in which students raise problems they have at work and we work together in resolving those issues professionally based on theories and strategies. 

My concern is I am sort of losing interest in teaching general English and am more keen on teaching Business on a broader level i.e. academically. I find teaching Business English from a language perspective not as motivating as I would like it to be especially when there's a lot to give and share but the medium does not exist or focuses mainly on language areas.

Cheers,

Sahar

Dear Sahar,

Thank you so much for sharing your experience with us. Your work sounds terrific! Your institution seems to meet the current needs of your students.

Personally I liked the idea of corporate courses, maybe because this is not yet developed in Russia on this level, particularly in my city. Lately there has been a demand for such courses from different companies, but I am not sure if it is well met by the tutors, mostly on private basis. I regard it to be the hardest part maybe, though the most exctiting, because each time you have to tailor the program to particular needs, and invent new ways, and adapt to certain setting. The most demanding type of courses, that's for sure.

Also Skills Courses sound very exciting and necessary. For example, we teach mostly Business Correspondence, but not really business reports writing, though I regard it to be very important. Into the skills area I would also put Interviewing, because it is problematic area in real life, if you don't know how to deal with it.

Your interest in the Business Context sounds great and encouraging. I agree that when you teach BE sooner or later you will have to face the necessity to discuss business topics (that's why I'm such an advocate of CLIL).

Anastasia.

Dear Anastasia,

I have taught only two Business English courses to date. They were in-house training in an automotive parts company here in Germany. The office workers ALL need English in their daily lives. The company paid for the training, but the students had to check out for the time they spent in lessons (90 minutes weekly). The courses went over a year (up to 35 sessions). After a certain amount of time in a course, the students were expected to take a telc exam, either B1 or B2. (see the thread on this, http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2009/forum/cef-learning-aims#comment-1355 )

The main problem I was faced with was the fact that the busier the students were at work, the more business trips they had to go on, the more meetings they had to attend, in fact the more they needed English, the fewer lessons they could actually come to. It was really a bit frustrating for both sides, because their work had to take priority and I never had a full turnout.

The book I used was Business Options by Adrian Wallwork.

What more details would anyone like me to tell ?

Diana

http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2009/forum/introductions-1#comment-65

Dear Diana and Anastasia,

I do agree with you and share my frustration with corportate clients who train in-house. I am sorry to say that these clients invest a lot of money on nothing, they would like to enhance their language skills, but they hardly commit to classes or class work.

The main problem is the emotional blackmail they try to do at the end of course, when certificates are given. They do not accept the grades or the fact they failed the course as their company would make them pay for the course or their promotion would be affected. No matter what we do, they always come with some excuse and we have to deal with them delicately as they are "corporate".

I used to teach one of those courses two years ago, but I never expressed interest since then. As you might have expressed as well, You spend quality time preparing lessons and materials tailored to their needs, but no one turns up in class, or you have a class of two out of 20. Unlike Anastasia's business managers who go on business trips, these are clients working next door to our school.

Business Options comes second best for me after Market Leader, it follows the functional, communicative approach with focus on real business situations. It raises students' awareness to social and cultural issues, often neglected in other business english coursebooks.

Sahar

Hello everyone,

I am a visitor from the Global Issues area, where I am one of the moderators, but I would also like to contribute here by sharing some experiences of teaching in - company. 

I share the frustration of erratic attendance. Unfortunately, the people who study English in order to use it on business trips spend a lot of time travelling for work instead of attending class, and I don´t see an easy solution to this problem. In the past, I have tried  to exploit the trip in class, by asking students to report on their trips, or by having other students prepare interview questions for absent classmates about their trip. I also try to encourage students to keep a record of new language they learn on the trip, as well as any language questions that come up while they are away, which can be shared with the rest of the class on their return.

When the students are present, I find teaching in - company challenging, because the students are still in their workplace, and one of my biggest frustratios is that it is often very difficult to eliminate interruptions and distractions that this causes. 

I also find that not being fully in control of the classroom space can create many practical problems. It can be difficult to organise furniture in a way that allows students to be flexible in their groupings or to move around in mingle activities, and availability of equipment can be difficult to arrange.

Does anyone have any good solutions to these problems?

Helen

Hi everyone,

I’d like to join this very interesting discussion. I’ve been doing corporate teaching for the last 3 years. I enjoy it a lot though, I agree that it is a very challenging work and there are a lot of questions need to be answered.
I personally found it easy to manage the classroom space. I was surprised to see how people over 40 and even more enjoyed all these group activities. It was easy to make them move around or change places. Surprisingly, when I teach 20 year old students at the university, it is more difficult to make them be the same “flexible”, change pairs, etc.-)) And they are much younger!

So, here are the problems that I’ve experienced in my practice and would like to share:

1. Some attitude/behavior/grouping uncomfortable situations. What I mean here is the following. Corporate clients in one and the same company can hold different posts, so it can turn out that among your students there will be people holding higher and lower positions, e.g. a subordinate and his boss. They will feel uncomfortable if they do some activities together.

For example, a subordinate can feel uneasy to play a role of a boss in a dialogue if it is played with his real boss. I had a really very difficult situation once when it appeared that two women in my group were boss’s lover and boss’s ex-lover. It may seem funny but it was really so. These women were difficult to work with, they were provoking conflicts in the group. When I made them work in a pair once I understood that I would never do that again.-)) One of the women missed quite a few classes before I understood what was wrong there. Certainly I didn’t know their reasons at the beginning of the course! How could I overlook them? To tell the truth I didn’t even know that such situation may happen in my group.-)) You can’t ask about such things in a test. The only thing I do now is using a kind of questionnaire before the course about students’ expectations, goals. They also write their posts there.

2. Sometimes we have to deal with company's policy. It is not in the company's interest to provide training and then loose well-qualified staff. It is a sensitive question but risk could be taken. I was put in a situation once when employees expressed their interest in developing extra communication skills in BE which is great. But such an idea was taken as a threat by the manager of the company. He didn't approve of learning how to compose and structure professional CV for example. So, all these demotivated some part of the group that resulted in poor attendance and frustration.

3. The time of the lessons. My experience showed that it is no good to organize lessons early in the mornings when people are half asleep or just don’t want to come to work so early and late in the evening when everyone wants to go home, are tied, in a hurry. If it is possible I always negotiate about the day time for my classes, but my practice showed that the majority of bosses think that these lessons have to take place not during working hours and even not during lunch-break. I think that being afraid to lose benefit bosses actually lose more when they insist on early or late time for English lessons for their employees. What happens is that finally there are just 4 people in a group out of 10.

4. I absolutely agree that it is particularly difficult to achieve such a situation in corporate teaching when all the students attend classes and do their homework. They always go on business trips or just are not enough motivated to prepare well on their own. However, there are always highly motivated students in every group that are pleasure to work with. They come at any time and prepare their homework in spite of everything.

Hope my experience was of any interest to you.

Best,
Nataliya

Dear Nataliya,

Thank you for sharing your rich experience with us. It is certainly interesting and useful. I agree that personal and professional interrelations could be really hard to manage in the corporate setting, maybe this is another problem to discuss besides absenteeism.

Anastasia.

Hi everyone,

 I'm finally getting back to you Anastasia and others that commented on one of my posts weeks back.  I had mentioned that I have started doing blended learning courses to help with the problem of attendance.  I would like to be able to report that it is completely successful, but I am still having problems with students not committing.  As a teacher it's very frustrating because you set up a course, catered to a companies needs by giving them flexibility both with time constraints and material, and yet they still can't seem to commit to participating in the activities.  I was supposed to have a Skype class with the boss a few days ago and he didn't show up.  Not only did he not show up but he didn't call to excuse himself or give any explanation.  When I asked him what had happened, he said that he hadn't been at home and couldn't go on Skype!  I'm a teacher and mom of three so my time is valuable.  It's often hard to combine my activities on a daily basis and I find that many people learning English within their company are just not committed enough.  If someone else is paying for it, it's easier for them to miss classes or forget appointments.  That being said, I still advocate for the use of wikis with busy adults.  I am hoping that combining the face to face classes, Skype and a wiki will somehow cater to the different needs of everyone doing the course.  They have a choice,  They just have to use the choices to their own advantages!

Susan

Hi Susan,

Thank you so much for your interesting addition to our discussion. It is true it is far from being easy to find the commitment from the adults - maybe it is easier with youngsters from the point of motivation: if they are really interested, they find the necessary time for the classes, but with the grown-ups it has been noticed already, that no matter how interested they are, they always find excuses for not being prepared or even missing the classes. And I know myself how frustrating it could be when the student doesn't even call in advance when he/she is going to miss the class. I guess all of these problems appear when people don't have enough discipline and breeding. Unfortunately, it is all around us. Some teachers find different ways out. Of course if we talk about busy businesspeople with lots of commitments and business trips, nothing can be done to cure the situation. Personally I always try to combine motivation with discipline. The more you ask from your students - the more committed they seem to be.

Looking forward to hearing more from you, 

Anastasia