Here's a quick technique I used last week with my business English students. We're using Business Benchmark (CUP), just getting to the end of unit 1, where there's a BEC-style speaking task:
Your company has decided it needs to provide more training for staff. You have been asked to help prepare a staff training programme. Discuss the situation together and decide ...
And there's a few pointers to guide our discussion. This is, as I say, a typical BEC speaking exam task, so the author is right to leave it very open. But I wanted to make it less exam-oriented and more structured.
So ... before the role-play, I wrote the following on the board:
- Country
- Company
- Products/services
- Employees
- Problems
... and then started eliciting. A few years ago when I tried this technique before we ended up with an Icelandic company which made ice-cream. This time it was less exciting: a Spanish company making big trucks and fire engines. Their employees, according to my students, included sales staff, technical staff and production staff. The company's problems included poor quality, cheap overseas competition (guess which country) and poor staff morale.
OK, so with that quick elicitation done, my students are ready for a much more productive and entertaining role-play. It always works well and often generates lots of laughs.
One of the biggest dangers in ESP, and indeed any courses where you don’t have a course book, is DRIFT. The teacher plans from lesson to lesson: an interesting text here, a bit of work on present perfect there, some useful phrases for emails over there … but where is it all leading? Are the students actually making any progress towards a goal? How can that be measured? Is that even the right goal for them?
Don’t get me wrong, lesson-by-lesson planning is fine up to a point, and I’ve recently found myself slipping into it quite often, but I always get the uneasy feeling that I should be doing more to structure the lessons. In other words, to turn a string of lessons into a coherent course.
But where do you start?
Well, the first step is obviously some sort of needs analysis, but I don’t really want to get into that in this post. I mentioned it here, and I’ll certainly come back to it in future posts. But for the sake of argument, let’s assume we have a good idea of what our students need from their course.
Where I teach, at the British Council, we have semesters of 31 lessons of 90 minutes each, so I’ll use that as my model. It could be, of course, that you don’t have semesters at all in your teaching situation – lessons start when the client signs the contract, and finish when you’re undercut by a rival language school (or one with better marketing), or the next financial crisis causes your client to put those expensive English lessons on hold. If that’s the case, consider imposing your own pseudo-semesters. How many lessons are there between now and Christmas? 18? OK, that could be your semester.
Coming back to my 31-lesson semester, the first thing to do is to break the course down into units (or modules, if you prefer to call them that). So I’ll give myself 6 units of 5 lessons each (with an extra lesson at the end for something Christmassy, or a test, or whatever). So now instead of worrying about 31 ‘things’, now I only have 6 things to worry about – a big psychological improvement.
Those 6 things should be topics or broad scenarios. If our course is for factory managers, for example, we could have a unit about factories, one on production lines, one on staff management, one on health and safety, one on technical problems and one on machines. For example. These are just off the top of my head ideas, and of course I’d base a real course on needs analysis. But let’s go with these six units.
Now the next step is to sketch out a grid to help you plan your units. Let’s create a table with the unit titles down the first column, and along the top row we’ll have the following titles: Reading, Writing, Listening, Speaking, Grammar, Vocab and Functions. (I could have added Pronunciation here, but that’s something I tend neglect, for reasons I’ll explain one day).
I can now start filling in the spaces in the grid with the info I picked up in the needs analysis. What are their priorities in terms of grammar? Perhaps I can get some reading texts from their company websites, or the website of the governmental body that regulates their part of industry, or the UK equivalent of that agency. What writing situations did they say they needed to work on? What functional language would support them in each of those situations? What about speaking – what role-plays can I set up which will practise those situations well? What functional language will support them in those role-plays? Can I find listening / video materials to serve as models? And so on.
Each of the boxes should generate approximately one lesson … well, actually, I only need five lessons per unit, so I’ll aim to get one out of the reading (with discussion and vocab), one out of the listening (again with discussion and vocab), a third out of a big role-play (with functional language input) and a fourth out of a writing task (with a model to read and some functional language input). That leaves the fifth lesson in each unit for odds and ends, like some grammar pulled out of the text and the listening, some vocab revision and recycling, perhaps some feedback on the writing, that sort of thing.
The table doesn’t actually need to be complete at this stage – a sketch is fine, because I’ll get many more ideas as I’m actually teaching the course. Course design is always something of a fiction – as soon as you get into the classroom you’ll see all sorts of holes in your current plan and all sorts of opportunities to fill those holes.
So I’d aim to get the first two units planned in great detail, and leave the others as sketches. I’ll then actually write the first unit – easier said than done, but I guess that’s something for a later post too. And we’re ready to go.
Well, almost.
I’m terrible at planning timing. An activity that I plan as a 10-minute warmer sometimes takes off and sees me through two whole lessons. Other times, a big showpiece 5-page extravaganza can be sailed through in a matter of minutes, if the students don’t share my own enthusiasm for it.
So … you’ve got to have a stash or warmers, fillers, uppers, downers and shame-faced time-wasters up you sleeve. Again, I’ll save my ideas on these for a later post, but you’ll find some of my favourites in my two teacher’s books (available from all good bookshops).
And that’s it. A homemade course with a beginning and an end. When you finish, your students will have a neat stack of six attractive and chunky handouts to remind them of what they’ve achieved, rather than the random pile of dog-eared one-pagers that they usually accumulate during lessons. And you can use that stack of handouts as the basis of your end-of-course test, to see if they've actually made any progress towards those meeting needs that you analysed so painstakingly at the beginning.
As always, feedback is very welcome. Do you use these or similar techniques? Is it as easy as I’ve made it out to be, or are there more traps we need to look out for? Looking forward to seeing your ideas.
I spent most of the first half of my teaching career in factories, including half a year in a paper factory (where they turned trees into boxes) and three and a half years in a cigarette factory.
That was where I first got into ESP, although at the time I didn't know there was a name for what I was doing.
In the very early days, I had one-to-one lessons with the Health and Safety Manager, so every lesson we used to go through her huge H&S Manual (which was in English) and see where it would take us. I called that course English for Health and Safety. I did something similar with a group of accountants preparing for their ACCA exams (English for Finance) and the team of junior managers who were being trained in their new SAP computer system in English (English for SAP Coordinators).
A bit more sophisticated was my first course on sales, English for Regional Sales Managers, where I actually wrote some of my own materials, and English for Company Chauffeurs (for the A1-level drivers who ferried VIPs around and needed to say "Let me help you with your bag" instead of "Give me bag!"). My final course in the cigarette factory, English for Production Trainers, was my most ambitious. The students were the factory's top engineers who had become trainers within the factory and were being groomed to train in other factories around the world. In English, of course.
So at the end of my stint in the factory, I had a pretty impressive ESP CV (although the names for my courses didn't show much imagination - a tradition I'm pleased to say has continued with the series I edit for Cambridge University Press). But in fact the courses in those days were based on the simplest of teaching techniques. One of my favourite such techniques was the fabulous Factory Tour.
Basically, this involved the student(s) showing me round their part of the factory and explaining everything in English. ... er ... and that's it. Of course I did error correction and noted useful new vocab, but otherwise there was no input from me. What I loved about the tours (apart from the fact that I could get away with a whole lesson with no preparation) was that I got to know the factory really well - better in fact than most of the employees. When you've been shown the same machine by a production manager, an accountant, the H&S manager, an engineer and the factory boss, you get a really deep understanding of how everything works.
But there was always the nagging feeling that I should be providing more input, rather than just correcting the output. At the end of last year, I stumbled across a video of an authentic factory tour on the BBC news website - well, actually it was a tour of a TV recycling plant, but the language of the tour is what I was interested in. So I set about analysing the language of describing processes as part of a factory tour. Here's what I came up with:
a. What you can see here is the conveyor belt which takes the circuit board away.
b. Over here is where the glass is cut and dropped down a chute.
c. What we do here is we use a rotary diamond blade to separate the back glass, containing lead, from the front glass, which has some hazardous coatings.
d. What happens next is the TV yokes are sent to another specialist recycling plant.
e. What we have to do next is separate the glass section from all the other components.
f. This is where the old televisions are brought in to the plant.
g. What’s going on here is the televisions are taken apart.
So lots of great what-clefting, as well as a few more such introductory phrases - phrases which focus the listener's attention, and allow the main content of the utterance to come at the end, where it'll be more prominent. What-clefting is one of my favourite grammar structures: once you start noticing it, it's everywhere.
Anyway, you can find my activity on Recycling Televisions here, and the BBC clips here and here. You don't actually need internet access in the classroom to try the activity - and you don't need to be in a factory. If you do use this lesson, I'd love to hear how you get on with it.
