[EDLING:2067] EducationGuardian.co.uk: Business is ready for the right skills

[fmhult at DOLPHIN.UPENN.EDU]

Francis Hult spotted this on the EducationGuardian.co.uk site and thought you should see it.

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Note from Francis Hult:

"Communications skills are part of what separates business English from general English. Along with the specific professional content and vocabulary that a student might request, knowing how to deliver your message effectively is key to business success. Not surprisingly, many language teachers do not regard this area as part of their brief. After all, most of us entered language teaching to teach language. We are not experts on how to give an effective presentation, lead a successful meeting or network at conferences." 

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To see this story with its related links on the EducationGuardian.co.uk site, go to http://education.guardian.co.uk

Business is ready for the right skills
Teachers can do more to refine their role in training, says John Hughes
Friday November 17 2006
The Guardian


Communications skills are part of what separates business English from general English. Along with the specific professional content and vocabulary that a student might request, knowing how to deliver your message effectively is key to business success. Not surprisingly, many language teachers do not regard this area as part of their brief. After all, most of us entered language teaching to teach language. We are not experts on how to give an effective presentation, lead a successful meeting or network at conferences.  Regardless of these misgivings at the classroom level, communication skill terminology has continued to prove attractive for syllabus designers since the 1990s. Terms such as meetings, presentations, telephoning, socialising and negotiating help to define what business people need to do in English. They offer achievable goals and outcomes.  For ELT authors, they make meaningful titles for units in course books and in some cases have become titles for books in t
 heir own right. Students also seem familiar with them and more readily respond to a lesson aimed at teaching the language for something practical like how to "socialise at dinner" than distinguishing between the past simple and present perfect.  Approaches and ideas about communication skills have not stood still. Modern business English course content and delivery have had to evolve in order to reflect changing modern business practice. Successful businesses people are multi-taskers and multi-skilled. They don't walk into a presentation and only "present". They also socialise with audience members beforehand and write emails to follow up contacts afterwards. In response to this, some course books and courses have become less modular with communication skills combined into context or subsumed under a business topic.  My own experience of writing a book on English for telephoning challenged my assumption that it could be sectioned up into handy functions like "getting through
 " and "arranging to meet". While these functions still exist and prove invaluable, tele-phoning also requires the language of meetings and discussion in a conference call or making small talk at the end of a phone conversation.  Jeremy Comfort is a business English author and director of York Associates, which specialises in corporate language training. He echoes the view that the traditional notion of communications skills needed to change. "It is not always useful to separate out these sorts of skills." However, he also believes it is now time to take our approach a step forward with a new range of skills.  Comfort sees many of the old skills as channels we use to communicate rather than as skills on their own. So while the channel might be a conversation via an online webcam, he says "skills such as 'active listening', 'exposing your intention', 'influencing' are the underlying skills that support all communication."  These are generic communication skills, according to C
 omfort. For example, the skill of "active listening" will involve asking the speaker questions, understanding the other person's point of view and so influencing that person to be more open to listening to you. It can be applied in almost all business situations.  So are teachers ready to deal with communications skills teaching? Perhaps they would be if a less hands-on approach were taken. In the past teachers perceived that they were expected to comment on issues such as the quality of the learner's visual aids or meaningful body language. As a result, some embraced the opportunity to switch from language teacher to paralinguistic guru (with varying results) but the majority shied away from communication skills.  However, helping learners develop these skills has in fact always been an achievable goal for many teachers. First of all, much of the skill is inherent in the language itself. For example, you can't teach the greeting "How do you do. Pleased to meet you," without
  addressing the issue of what is the customary gesture for a first meeting in your student's culture. Perhaps it's a handshake but it might also be a bow.  Secondly, the business English teacher will benefit from taking on the role of coach rather than trainer when dealing with these skills. With language we are qualified to impart knowledge but we are equally accustomed to helping students to recognise how they need to improve and develop. Giving feedback or providing the tools for learners to assess their own performance, for example by videoing a student, is part of this process. With groups we can encourage peer feedback and allow classrooms to become forums to discuss what is effective behaviour or successful communication. 
· John Hughes is the author of Telephone English (Macmillan) 

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