Business English incorporated

Another stumbling point in everyday language teaching and learning is to make students complete some research, do some writing about what they have researched and then present it in class. The fact that students hate writing in a foreign language is already enough. But have them do some research prior to it and then, on top of it, force them to speak in class! Blasphemous!

Well, there is a cure for that. 

Several years ago, I used to teach Business English at a tertiary institution where my students had to prepare for the TOEFL test and for an entrance exam for an MBA course in the States. My group included students from lower intermediate to advanced students, which is why, quite expectedly, I had great difficulty finding a way of teaching that would cater for their different levels. 

One aspect that I had to cover in my classes was that of advertising and marketing. One of the units was covering the process of launching and commercialising new products. Different segments were being introduced, such as creating an advertising plan, developing a news media strategy, selecting sales channels as well as sales promotions and reaching customers. One way to present and sell products is at a trade fair. Therefore, I came up with the idea to organise a class fair of non-existent products/ services! 

The students were asked to come up with products or services that did not exist! They had to prepare an advertisement for the product/ service, preferably the product itself. They could make a poster, prepare a PowerPoint, make their own video or song. The more creative ones among them came up with all of these. 

Clear instructions had to be provided to include the research part. Namely, the students had to make sure they thoroughly investigated the particular model of advertisement, commercial, endorsement, etc. they decided to use. They had to find out all about the model, analyse it properly and apply it to their own product/ service in as many details as possible. 

For instance, if they had opted for the display stand, a rather popular one and often seen in big shopping centres and supermarkets, they would have to really build it and include all the tiny details that go with it. If they had chosen the endorsement, such as the one often seen in magazines, they would have to use Photoshop or some other imaging tool. 

Although the idea scared some of the students off, an incentive was provided in the form of extra points for excellent oral and visual presentations of the product/ service at the fair. Also, there had to be enough time for the students to prepare for the fair. 

Some of the project/ services my students presented in class included the following:

1. Weed cereals - The student had made the box and put some grass into it. He decorated the box by pasting real paper on it with a photoshopped image of weed and cereals so that the cereals actually looked as if made of weed. A boy was presented pouring the cereals into a bowl. The student had also added all the text usually found on cereal boxes including ingredients and the details related to the producer. To be honest, his final presentation in class was so good that we were at the verge of paying him money for the cereals! He had prepared an excellent speech!

2. Rent-a-professorbot - The student had prepared the very unusual service of renting a robot professor. He had prepared a poster, where there was an image of me, but looking as a robot. The advertising slogan printed on the poster was: She'll teach you English without ever complaining about you! This presentation was very funny as it was a clear allusion to me, but in a very subtle and inoffensive way. The spoken performance was also very good.

3. Invisibility cream - The student had taken an old cream jar which he wrapped in his own label. He had done some photoshopping presenting the stages through which the person using the cream would pass while becoming invisible. He had put some Nutella into the jar, which made the presentation of the product look even funnier as he actually put the Nutella on his face claiming that he was invisible! The performance was at a high level as well.

4. Barum-barum - A group of six students chose to prepare a beverage made of water, cocoa powder and a bit of rum flavour usually used for cakes. This presentation was the most brilliant one as the students had actually prepared the beverage, brought it to class, arranged a sales stand, prepared a written presentation illustrating the product and recorded their own video commercials, i.e. three commercials they themselves acted in! I consider this presentation the best that any group of students has ever made for any of my Business English classes because they all spoke, they had all written and they had all participated, which is not quite common when a group of several students (allegedly together) prepare some group assignment.

There are many more examples, but the scope of a regular post would be by far exceeded. After all, there should be some room for new ideas in the future. I must admit that I still keep the recordings, the posters, the PowerPoints, the photographs I took while they were presenting their products and services. I can only recommend this kind of computer-assisted learning as it is a lot of fun and at the same time yielding really good results in three different skills: reading, writing, speaking!

Struggling with group work?

I guess that every teacher has had to endure the frustrating experience of wanting to do something really different and then realising that it turned out rather disappointing. Motivated by enlightening inspiration and magical revelation,  you prepare some brilliant group activity, you bring the material you spent hours preparing and then... nothing! 

Group work, project development and class discussions are not something students like to do. But why? They always complain they would like to step out of the ordinary and do something really different. 

The problem is that they generally do not like to speak in class. Teachers have to realise that students sit there mainly because they loose points for attendance if they don't. Since they do not want to have something as trivial as that influencing  their final mark, or because they realise that attendance points are easy points to make, they come to class and they just sit there. How frustrating that is!

My experience has shown that in each group of students, there is usually one student (or if I am lucky, two or three of them), outspoken enough to participate and willing to say something. Yet, most often, they are willing to say something only when I call out their name. In other words, the only way to achieve at least some sound of them is to have each student do a sentence or provide an answer in some exercise. It is difficult to get out of the old-fashioned approach where the teacher calls out a student, asks a question and the student is literally forced to say something. Bottom line, learner autonomy suffers and no independent learning can be furthered. Group work seems out of the question.

Anyway, there are ways. A very good activity I have had quite some success with is a group task I call "The trial". It is suitable for any level and for any setting. The main idea is that the teacher chooses a topic, any topic, and puts it on trial. This topic could  (or should) be related to some content in class. My experience proves that boring reading topics may be turned into rather interesting material when the students are challenged to prepare for "The trial".

The students are divided into three groups: the defence lawyers, the prosecutors and the judges. The first two groups, the lawyers and the prosecutors are each instructed to prepare two sets of information: 1) arguments they would use to defend/ prosecute the subject matter on trial and 2) arguments they would use as replies to accusations and points stated by the opposing party. The third group, the judges, should prepare a list of anticipated arguments and be ready to come to a verdict based on whether their anticipations have proved correct or not. The role of the teacher is to be an arbitrator, who will try to keep the discussion from meandering and make sure that all arguments are fully explored before a new one is introduced.

Topics I have tried out so far, ranged from television to the death penalty. For instance, when my students did the death penalty, I instructed them to prepare the arguments as explained above. They had a week to prepare for the task and they were allowed to use as many sources as they could find - preferably online reading resources. I instructed them to take a look at resources, such as the Criminal Code of the Republic of Serbia, the Act to Introduce the Code of Crimes against International Law, International Criminal Law in Germany and United America Criminal Code. As it was a group of 24 students, there had to be eight students in each group. In order to have each of them prepare at least something, I divided the topic into eight subtopics so that each of them would have to prepare one aspect.

The subtopics were as follows:

1) death penalty in the legislation in Serbia

2) death penalty in the legislation in international law

2) death penalty throughout history

3) death penalty in practice in Serbia

4) death penalty in practice in the international setting

5) the issue of human rights

6) the level of effectiveness of the punishment

7) the possibility of rehabilitation of offenders who have escaped the death penalty

8) What when somebody is executed and then discovered innocent?

I had planned a ninety-minute session for the activity but it turned out that we could not explore all the arguments in one session so we decided to take up another one the following week. 

Now, the results were encouraging. Since each student had to focus on a very narrow topic, they prepared very well for it. In class, I asked them to sit physically divided from each other. In other words, I had the opposing parties move their chairs to two opposing walls, while the judges took their places at the wall in between. I then called out the first student from the lawyer group and asked for the argument regarding the first subtopic. After having stated their point, I asked a student from the prosecutor group to reply and to propose a new argument in line with the information they had prepared at home. Then the lawyer student could reply to the newly-stated argument. Then I asked the judges to come to a conclusion regarding the first subtopic based on the merit they could identify in the opposing arguments and replies. After that, we moved to the second topic. As expected, the most heated discussion was brought about with the issue of human rights and the level of effectiveness of the punishment. That is exactly why we had to plan a new session so as to cover the last four topics, which then, not surprisingly at all, took us another ninety-minute session. The follow-up I came up with after the first session included a short summary of their points of view. I waited with the assignment after the second session was over and I was surprised to find out that each of them submitted a summary. Never before had that happened!

My conclusion was that there are two points that turned this particular task into a successful activity: 1) the preparatory step was linked to rather narrowly defined subtopics so that each of the students had a clear representation and expectation of the task in class and 2) I controlled the discussion so that they could not deviate from what they had prepared. In other words, the prepared list of subtopics was both an agenda and our anchor to hold on to in case of insecurity, stage fright and similar reasons leading to possible failure.

I am not sure whether an activity like this could and should be planned more often during the semester. The predicted scope of classes might make it rather impossible as other aspects and segments in the syllabus would suffer immensely. Yet, I am positive that two classes per semester (maybe even four) should not harm the course. Quite on the contrary, considering the benefits of "The trial", I would gladly substitute some of the boring activities in my Legal English course more often.