Welcome! We’re Debbie and Caireen co-authors, with Jennifer, of  The Business English Teacher and we’ll be on the blog discussing business English over the next four weeks.

Teaching business English is exciting- you will always have to deal with teaching people from new companies or sectors of industry, or people doing new jobs even in a company you know well. There’s definitely a lot of variety in our job! In this first blog, we’d like to look at the role of the business English teacher and how it differs from that of a general English teacher.

One key difference is the learners we teach. In general English, people tend to join open groups and may not know their classmates beforehand or have anything in common with them. In business English, our learners are often employees of the same company with specific learning needs. They could be from the same department, or a mixture of different departments. In this situation, the company pays for the course, investing in language learning in order to make their employees more effective in their jobs. Another situation you may find yourself in as a business English teacher is teaching pre-experience learners, for example business students. Sometimes there will also be open groups where people from different companies can join, but then these will usually have a specific focus such as English for presentations or English for the financial sector.

Another important difference is where we teach. We’re often not in a school or a classroom but working in company, teaching in offices and meeting rooms. This can affect the materials and technology you have available as you might find yourself having to carry a lot of things such as MP3 players and dictionaries around. You might also not know from one week to the next which room you are going to be and what facilities are available, which can affect your planning.

Finally, what we teach is different.  The thing that all professional business English lessons have in common is that they are needs focussed and lessons have to meet these specific needs. For most business people, time is at a premium and they are also used to seeing a return on investment. They want the lessons to help them do their jobs better and they want to be able to see measurable progress.  At the beginning of the course you will ask your learners what they need to learn, and then design lessons to help them achieve their goals. These goals will usually be practical, e.g. to give better presentations or to use a wider range of vocabulary relating to the retail industry. It is often the case that you have a fixed block of lessons and so it is important that you make sure your learners’ goals are achieved during this time or the company, who is paying for the course, will not be satisfied.

We’d be really interested to hear what you think.

What do you love about teaching business English?

For you, what are the biggest challenges about teaching business English?

We look forward to your answers, comments and questions.

Debbie and Caireen