In our last blog, we looked at the challenges of dealing with unexpected situations in business English lessons.  Now we’d like to look at another area which can present challenges- teaching vocabulary specific to the learner’s industry.

Whatever your learners do for their jobs, they need to learn the vocabulary connected with it, whether they work in a factory and need to order parts for their machinery from an international supplier, or whether they work in a bank and need to advise clients on investment possibilities. You may have a lot of knowledge about some industries from previous work experience or from working with learners in these industries in the past, but you may wonder how you are expected to teach specialist vocabulary from industries you feel you know less about.

Here are some tips we have used for dealing with specialist vocabulary:

• Use the internet. Research your learner’s company website and find out what the company does. Research your student’s industry to find out what their job involves- Wikipedia is great for this as it usually explains things in simple terms. Use news articles about the industry, which will include specialist vocabulary-The Financial Times and The Economist are good resources. Also have a look at competitors‘ websites as a source of vocabulary and discussion, especially if your learners‘ website is not available in English.
• Use a specialist dictionary. There are monolingual and bilingual dictionaries available for some areas e.g. financial, legal, human resources. Taking this into the lesson with you and showing learners how to use it teaches them valuable learner autonomy skills.
• Use resource books. There are a variety of publications called English for… or similar which provide language related to a specific industry or job. However, these books are usually quite general and may not relate exactly to the job your learners are doing, so make sure you also find out more specific requirements from your learners, for example by using some of the techniques we talk about in the needs analysis section of The Business English Teacher.
• Use your learners. Get them to give you documents from their jobs and use these in lessons. For the factory example above, learners may provide a brochure or list with the names of all the parts in English, maybe even including diagrams. For the financial example above, play the part of a non-expert and get learners to explain about investment in everyday terms. In any group of learners, people will know different things, so get them used to helping each other with industry and company-specific language.

As a business English teacher, it is important to be interested in learning more about the business world and teaching specialist vocabulary in a new industry is the kind of challenge which keeps many of us doing this fascinating job. However, you cannot know or be expected to know all the vocabulary connected with every job in every industry; for example, you cannot know the same range of legal vocabulary as someone who has trained for years as a lawyer. Also, many companies have vocabulary specific to their corporate culture which it is difficult for an outsider to know. When teaching specialist vocabulary therefore it is vital to make this clear to your learners, to equip them with strategies for learning vocabulary and to show them how to exploit their own work documents so that they have the skills for improving their work-related vocabulary long after their course has ended.

How do you deal with teaching specialist vocabulary? What resources and strategies do you use? We look forward to your ideas, comments and questions.