Me and the blogosphere

I spent most of the summer either working like mad on my writing and editing work or relaxing in the sunshine with my wife and kids. So I kind of neglected not just my own blog, but also everyone else's.

Now I'm back in control again, and I've at last had a chance to check what fellow bloggers have been writing during my absence. And I've found some great stuff.

First of all, remember this piece I wrote - my thoughts on blogging - as part of a blog carnival organised by Karenne Sylvester at Kalinago English? Well, the carnival happened during my absence (as carnivals always seem to), and it's really worth spending a couple of hours wading through it, following all the links, noting down the great advice. I've only skimmed the surface of the wealth of knowledge and expert support for new bloggers like me, but I'll go back to this resource again and again.

One thing I noticed on Karenne's site was that she'd reached the number one spot on OneStopBlogs. Congratulations Karenne! But when I followed the link, I was delighted to see my own humble blog in the top ten. (It was number 9 when I first checked, number 11 yesterday, and back to 10 today - not that I'm obsessed or anything). How did that happen?

(Well, now I know how it happened. My blog was mentioned twice in other blogs in the OneStopBlogs list ... both times, it turned out, on Kalinago English. Once in the carnival and once on Karenne's round-up of blogs for June.)

Anyway, I kind of liked the idea of being in the top 10, so I set off in search of more statistics. (You won't be surprised, by the way, to hear that I check the sales of the books in my series about once a week, or that when I used to sell newspapers in Berlin I kept a graph of daily sales on my wall). I found a function on Blogger that tells me which sites link to this blog, and I found well over 100! I calmed down a bit when I realised that over half of these were from Vicki Hollett's blog, which has a short cut to my own. I guess every time she updates her blog (which seems to be quite often), I get a new link.

What I like about Vicki's blog is that the entries are all nice and short, so you can go in, get your quick fix of ideas / inspiration / enlightenment and get on with the rest of your life. I'll try to follow her example ... one day. Anyway, Vicki's great story on "How it all started" (well worth a read, including the comments) led me to explore Ken Wilson's blog.

As well as his own "How it all started" story (which, like Vicki's reminded me of the horrors of my first lessons - something I'll have to write about one day), I also loved his piece on native and non-native-English-speaker teachers (NESTs and non-NESTs - great acronyms!). I've been muttering about discrimination against non-NESTs for quite a few years, including a very stressful conference panel debate where the other three panelists ganged up on me! So that's something else I plan to explore on my own blog.

Coming back to the list of sites that linked to my own, I did find one genuine article, which was inspired by my post on non-experts teaching ESP: this very interesting piece on Margaret Marks' Transblawg. (Again, I'll come back to the points she raises in a later post here.) It's well worth exploring Margaret's blog, especially if you teach legal English - scan through her posts on law here, for a taster.

Anyway, seeing Margaret's post reminded me about a message I'd posted on LinkedIn's BESIG group when I started this blog, asking for opinions on the non-expert issue. It turned out there were a couple of great responses, which I REALLY will write up on this blog very soon, so I'll resist the temptation to say more on that topic for now. (There's nothing like a wander round the blogosphere to give yourself inspiraration!)

But while I was at LinkedIn, my eye was caught by a link to Carl Dowse's blog, where he had posted a video interview of Matt Firth by Gavin Dudeney. Matt is a legal English expert, someone I've worked with directly and indirectly quite a lot over the last couple of years (e.g. Matt co-authored Introduction to International Legal English, to which I wrote the teacher's book). That interview is well worth watching, not least because he has some really good points to make about the expert / non-expert debate (which, as I've said, I'll come back to!)

While I was at Carl's blog, I noticed in his list of topics immediately beneath Matt Firth was Nik Peachey. Nik gave me an early break in my career back in 2003/4, when he gave me the chance to moderate the Language Development discussion group on SearchEnglish, one of the British Council websites that Nik used to run (and which is sadly defunct nowadays).

(It could well be, of course, that I was the only person to volunteer to moderate that group, so I suspect he didn't have to agonize for long over the decision to take me on. But that opportunity gave me the chance to discuss things with learners and teachers all over the world ... well, mostly the discussions were between the moderators themselves (who also included Gavin Dudeney, Nicky Hockley and Graham Stanley, if I remember correctly), because I guess the world wasn't ready for our version of Web2.0 back then ...)

Anyway, it occurred to me that Nik could help me with my search for statistics, and sure enough I found this great tutorial on using Google Analytics to monitor traffic on one of his sites. Excellent. And as a result, dear reader, I now know EVERYTHING about you, haha!

From there, I finally made it back to Kalinago English, where there's a fascinating guest piece by Gavin Dudeney on inspirational women in ELT. Now perhaps I'm imagining things, but it feels as if Gavin's been following me on my trip around the blogosphere! Paranoia aside, I decided to check out Gavin's own blog, where he's got some great ideas on the future of books, which I'll be sharing with my colleagues in the world of publishing. Interestingly, it was Gavin who gave me some excellent advice about becoming an author the first time I met him (for a few minutes). (The second time we met, again briefly, it was deep underground, and we were very hungry, but that's another story).

So what have I learnt on my first real wander round the blogosphere? Well, I've learnt why it's called the blogosphere for a start - everything's connected to something else, forming a huge web of connections. Also, it does feel like a community. The same names keep coming up, and discussions lead both to unexpected, intriguing new sites and to reassuringly familiar places like Kalingo English, which is good when all the wandering around gets too much.

So I've created my own blog roll (called "Blogs I like", in the side bar), to help me find those blogs again. Also, because I enjoyed seeing my own blog mentioned elsewhere, I thought it'd be nice to return the compliment (and perhaps help those sites stay high in the rankings). Finally, if there's anyone out there who's as lost in the blogosphere as I've been, I hope I've helped you find some great places to start exploring. Have fun!

Imagery in Financial English

Have you ever noticed how rich Financial English is in terms of metaphors and imagery? I use metaphors and imagery all the time in my teaching to explain vocabulary, and I consider it to be an incredibly powerful memory tool. I'll tell my story first, and then come back to this important general point.

A few weeks ago, I did a reading text from the BBC on Over-the-Counter Derivatives with several groups of students. I'll admit now that I wasn't very creative with the text - most of the students had forgotten to bring their books (again) and I happened to have the text in my bag. I already knew it well after preparing this Jargonbuster exercise for Professional English Online (PEO). So we just did a predict-read-discuss-vocab lesson. (And you thought I always prepared immaculately polished lessons?)

I should also point out that my students weren't financial experts at all, but all seemed to appreciate this crash course in financial jargon. I also really enjoyed playing the expert: I'm actually pretty clueless about financial English, but I've had to do lots of research for my regular activities and jargonbusters on PEO, so I've started to get a general understanding of the murky world of finance.

It was as I was going through the vocab that I was struck by the beautiful imagery of financial English. Here are the key words from the text, in the order they appear (and I suggest you read the text quickly now before looking at this list). Notice all the pictures I ended up drawing - something I'll comment on at the end.

• Curb: This word originally meant the piece of metal between a horse's teeth, which the rider pulls to slow the horse down. [I drew a picture]. Nowadays curbs refer to anything that slows something down.
• Derivatives: Just as the word 'curb' derives from a piece of metal, derivatives derive from simple financial instruments like mortgages. [At this point I drew a diagram to explain how Collateralized Debt Obligations derive from mortgages - see this posting for the source of this diagram.].
• Over-the-counter derivatives: I explained the difference bewteen over-the-counter pharmaceuticals and prescription drugs, and elicited the parallels in derivatives markets.
• Convergence: I drew arrows to show converge and diverge, and gave examples from the history of languages (e.g. British and American English have been diverging for a long time, but in some ways they are now converging again).
• Regulatory framework: My students know frame as in picture frame, so I first made them think of the framework beneath a skyscraper - all those metal girders beneath the flimsy-looking glass exterior. From there it was easy to get to framework = underlying structure.
• Conduct (= behaviour): They knew conduct as a verb (with the accent on the second syllable), so I started with this. I elicited what you can conduct (e.g. a meeting, research, an orchestra). "What do you think it means if you conduct yourself in a particular way?", I asked. They worked out that it meant behave, so it was a short step from here to the noun (with the accent on the first syllable). For good measure, while we were on the noun, I also elicited professional misconduct and gross misconduct.
• Core problems: I drew an apple core.
• A build-up of sth: I used an exploding pressure cooker as an example.
• Leverage: I drew a picture of a fridge and a stick person (me, of course) trying to lift it. Then I gave my stick-self a crow bar to act as a lever. Suddenly I can lift something very heavy without much effort (shown on the diagram with a big upward arrow and a small downward arrow). This led me to a simple financial example of leverage: using my savings of £10,000 to buy a house worth £1 million. (NB In my dreams!) I then went back to my fridge picture to elicit what might happen if you take leverage too far: your lever breaks and your fridge falls on top of you, just as happened with banks that used too much leverage.
• Shock absorbers: I drew the suspension system in my car.
• Margin: I showed the margin of the page. I then elicited other types of margin, such as a profit margin or a margin of error to show how these could act as shock absorbers.
• Liquidity: I drew some bananas in a food blender (seriously). The bananas are fixed assets, but they can be liquidated  (well, actually liquidised, but I figured the financial term took priority over the cooking term) i.e. turned into banana milkshake (= cash) quite easily. I then drew a coconut - another fixed asset, but one which can't be liquidated so easily. So liquidity is the extent to which our assets are like bananas rather than like coconuts - how easy is it to turn them into milkshake (cash). You face a liquidity squeeze if your assets are long-term things like a house with a mortgage (which you can't just sell tomorrow to pay your short-term debts). Liquidity is another type of shock absorber.
• Cushions: I elicited a situation where a cushion could act as a shock absorber (e.g. if someone punches you, a cushion might make it hurt a bit less).
• To withstand sth: I drew a stick man trying to stand despite strong wind - to withstand the force of the wind. Then I related this back to the punching-a-cushion image - it's easier to withstand being hit in the face if you have a cushion. (Sorry for the silly imagery - the important thing is that it should be powerful and memorable, not necessarily realistic or pleasant).
• To contain a risk: I used the image of a hospital trying to contain an outbreak of a nasty stomach bug, by isolating the ward and imposing tight controls on people coming and going.

And that's it. You can imagine what my sheet of paper looked like by the end of the lesson, with a car, a blender, a horse, an apple ...

Anyway, the point of all this isn't just to teach you some financial jargon (for which I would refer you to a good dictionary rather than listening to me!) or even to show how to teach these particular words. Rather, I wanted to hammer home the importance of imagery as a teaching tool. All of those pictures I drew were quite time consuming, and in terms of getting the message across, probably unnecessary. But in terms of making them memorable, I think they're well worth it. An abstract concept like core or withstand is very difficult to learn unless you can attach it to a picture. And as I hinted above, the pictures may be silly, unpleasant, weird ... but as long as they're memorable, they're great. Ideally, they should be personalised too, so I used my car, my mortgage, someone punching you in the face, which is much more memorable than simply any old stick man.

The same goes for the words I explained without pictures. I think there's a fair chance my students will remember the chain from conDUCT a meeting through conDUCT yourself well to a code of CONduct and then gross misCONduct. Even if they don't remember it consciously, next time they see a word and momentarily wonder what it means, it may trigger a memory deep within their subconscious.

So today's tip is: make vocab memorable through imagery, metaphors and chains.

PS I promised a few months ago to tell you when my lesson on financial English videos was available. Well, it's here. If you try it with your class I'd love to hear how you get on.

PPS By coincidence, Karenne Sylvester has also been writing about images in financial English, and she seems to have spent a lot longer preparing her lesson than I ever do. [I thought she was supposed to be into dogme ...?] Anyway, you could use Karenne's techniques with my article, or the other way round, or both ...

Grammar syllabuses for ESP

(Apologies to purists who'd say the plural of syllabus is syllabi. To my mind, the word syllabus looks silly enough already without a fancy plural ending.)

One of the biggest differences between general English (GE) course books and ESP course books is that GE books tend to be driven by what I'd call a traditional grammar syllabus: Unit 1: Present Simple and Continuous; Unit 2: Past Simple; Unit 3: Present Perfect; Unit 4: The Future ... The syllabus may be prominent or disguised to varying degrees, but it always seems to be there.

Not so with ESP course books. Take International Legal English, for example. Here, the syllabus is very much topic-driven. We have units on contract law, company law, intellectual property law, and so on. The aims of the units are to help lawyers and law students to communicate in real-life professional situations such as lawyer-client meetings, contract drafting and discussions with colleagues. There may be some grammar input and practice to support those aims, but it's never the other way round (with the grammar aims leading the course and dictating the topics). What's more, the grammar is often field-specific, i.e. covering grammar topics that are unique to that ESP field. For legal English, field-specific grammar includes things like said/such, wherein/herewith/thereupon, and techniques for switching between legalese and plain English.

Another example comes from Cambridge English for Jobhunting, which teaches students how to write CVs and cover letters and how to perform brilliantly in job interviews. Now, imagine when we were creating that book we had started with a traditional grammar syllabus, and we were planning practice activities for present perfect. Hmmm ... how about job interviews? "Have you ever worked with children? How long have you worked for XYZ?".

The problem is, if you look at strong examples of authentic job interviews (as we did when we were researching the book), you find that present perfect isn't actually used in this way in real life. If the interviewers want to ask you about your experience, they'll ask you to "tell us about a time when you demonstrated ...". In other words, you'll need past simple, and perhaps some narrative tenses, but not present perfect. (There's also the issue that they won't ask if you've ever worked with children - that should come out of your CV, not the interview).

So what grammar do you need for job interviews? Let's look at this question: "Tell us about your weaknesses". It turns out there are several great techniques for answering this question. One is to talk about a weakness that you've actually overcome ("Well, I used to be a bit disorganised, but now ..."). In other words, it's worth teaching/practising used to. Another technique is to play down your weaknesses using phrases like "a bit", "very slightly" and "occasionally" ("Well, I can occasionally be a little bossy, but ..."). The interesting thing for me here is the use of can to show that the weakness is an occasional bad habit rather than a permanent character flaw. I've never seen can explained in those terms in a traditional grammar course, presumably because it's not an especially useful or common use of can. But it is an extremely useful piece of grammar for this particular situation.

So where does that leave the tradional grammar syllabus that I mentioned at the top of this post? I'd say that in modern ESP course books, there's no room for it. There are so many other teaching materials that contain systematic grammar syllabuses that we don't need to include them yet again in ESP books. Another way of looking at it is that there's so much specific language work that does need to be taught in ESP books (because it isn't taught in any other published materials), that it would be a waste of space to include traditional grammar. (This relates to my wish-list for ESP course design - we want course books to cover the difficult things like authentic listening materials and original language work, rather than the easy things that we teachers can make for ourselves).

What's more, ESP course books are often aimed at students with a much wider range of grammar needs than other books. For example, International Legal English will work well with students from B2 to c1 level and above, precisely because it doesn't focus on traditional grammar: the situation-based course aims will be broadly the same for both levels, where grammar-based aims would be very different.

The same goes for books aimed at different nationalities. My students in Poland need a lot of work on articles and present perfect, while native speakers of Spanish at the same level of proficiency would find that grammar work embarrassingly easy. And so on ...

BUT ... the key word in the above paragraphs was course books. There may be no room for a traditional grammar syllabus in the ESP books we use, but I'd argue we still need such a syllabus (tailored to our own students' needs, of course) in the courses we teach. But where do you get a grammar syllabus if not from your course book? You've got two options:

1. Create your own worksheets to teach and practise all the target grammar structures. This is what I do, although I'll admit it's very tough to be systematic and to actually integrate a whole grammar syllabus into an ESP course.
2. Supplement your ESP book with another book that does have a strong, systematic grammar syllabus. I'm talking about buying the book, of course, not photocopying it. Aside from the moral/legal issues surrounding photocopying, you and your students are more likely to be systematic if you have an actual book to work through. A grammar classic like Murphy would be fine, as would a GE or business English course book with a strong grammar syllabus. [My favourite used to be Business Opportunities, which had the best grammar syllabus of any book I've used. But it looks a bit dated nowadays, unfortunately.] So you could use your ESP course book on Mondays and your grammar-based book on Thursdays, for example.

Of course the ideal situation would be if ELT publishers brought out grammar books for each of the ESP areas, but for the time being at least, it seems there's not enough demand to justify the investment.

Perhaps one day in the future when I've got too much time and money on my hands I'll write them myself ... (I'll also try to post some grammar activities on this blog as I write them - look out for the 'grammar' label in the list of postings.)

So, what about you? Do you agree with my views on topic-based and grammar-based course books? Where do you get your grammar syllabus from (if you use one)? Or should we ESP teachers forget about grammar and leave it to the general English teachers? Add your comments below.

PS I've just been having an idle look around the blogosphere (still a very new experience for me, being very slow on the uptake) and I came across Alex Case's bank of 500 worksheets. I haven't checked them all out, but it seems to me you could make a pretty good free grammar syllabus for your ESP course just by exploring all the great ideas here.

Deadlines, deadlines ...

So much for my noble aims of writing a couple of times a week - it's now been more like five weeks that I've been neglecting this poor blog of mine. And all the time, I'm told, my interview with Lawrence Harris was badly formatted to make it unreadable. (Although on my computer it actually looked fine). Anyway, I hope that's fixed now - thanks to Karenne and Lawrence for helping me out!

The frustrating thing about being involved in publishing is that I can't tell you all the exciting things I've been busy with - it's all top secret until the new books are ready for publication. But I don't think I'll get into trouble for mentioning that my series, Cambridge English for ..., is growing. We launched the series last year with four titles, Jobhunting, Engineering, Nursing and the Media, but of course the plan is to keep adding to the series as long as there's demand for new titles. So I've been very busy working on the latest titles. Watch this space for news of the new additions, probably within a month or so.

The thing that's kept me busiest over the summer has been an online course in technical English for a university, to which I've been adding content. I'll write up a blog entry about that when I've finished my work on that course.

I also did some legal English teacher training over the summer, which I mentioned here. That was a great experience, and gave me lots of ideas for this blog ... if only I had time to write them up!

Anyway, enough complaining. Time to get on with some proper blogging!

Fun with contracts

I've just finished a 3-day teacher training course - Teaching Legal English - which went very well, but which completely took over my week. (Apparently it's been hot and sunny ...)

One of the great things about teacher training is that it forces you to hunt back through your old materials from years ago, looking for inspiration. This week I stumbled across some work I did about 5 years ago, when I first got involved in legal English. Like most materials writers, I tend to dismiss my old work as hopelessly naive and embarrassing, but revisiting old stuff can remind you that it wasn't so bad after all.

Anyway, the materials I found related to extracts from contracts - how to understand them and how to write them.

The first exercise is about commas: students have to draw lines to show relations between different types of commas: list commas (e.g. A, B and C) and enclosing commas (e.g. ... including, but not limited to, the following ...).

Sorry if you can't read it clearly - I've copied the text below this paragraph just in case. Anyway, the point is, when you've done the intial matching, you find you're left with about 4 commas that don't match up with anything ... or rather they match up with each other over long distances. In the above extract, for example, the comma before "in each case" leads all the way back to the one after "expenses", 5 lines above. This sort of untangling exercise REALLY helps me to understand the complex relationships within monster sentences like the one above. So I guess they should help students too, not only when reading such sentences but also when drafting their own.

(a) The Partnership shall indemnify, to the fullest extent permitted by law, the General Partner and its officers, directors, employees, partners and agents ("Indemnified Parties") from and against all costs and expenses, including attorneys' fees, judgments, fines, settlements and/or liabilities incurred by or imposed upon any Indemnified Party in connection with, or resulting from, investigating, preparing or defending any action, suit or proceeding, whether civil, criminal, legislative or otherwise (or any appeal thereof), to which any Indemnified Party may be made a party or become otherwise involved or with which any Indemnified Party may be threatened, in each case by reason of, or in connection with, the Indemnified Party being or having been associated with or otherwise acting for the Partnership, or having acted as a director, officer, employee, partner or agent of any Entity in which the Partnership had invested, or by reason of any action or alleged action, omission or alleged omission by any Indemnified Party in any such capacity, provided that the Indemnified Party is not ultimately adjudged to have engaged in gross negligence or wilful misconduct, and provided further that the Indemnified Party acted in a manner that he reasonably believed to be in, or not opposed to, the best interests of the Partnership.

Before I move on, did you notice the mistake in the above clause? I'll tell you at the end. (It's very satisfying when a mere English teacher can find holes in an apparently beautifully-crafted legal text.)

OK, here's the next one:

Students have to complete the boxes, using this sentence from a contract:

During the course of your employment and following termination of your employment for any reason, you are required not to use, reproduce or disclose to any person, firm or company any information coming into your knowledge or possession which relates to the affairs or the business of Shark or any client or to the work performed by you, …

Again, this is really useful for understanding complex relationships within long sentences. (Speaking of which, can you spot the mistake when I made this 5 years ago?) Once the diagram's complete, of course, you can also get students to cover the text and recreate it orally or in writing using only the diagram. As a follow-up, get students to create their own diagram of a different sentence. And then get them to draw a diagram using their imaginations (based on, say, a role play) and then use the diagram to write a perfect sentence/clause. Fantastic!

The third example is very similar to the last one, but the answers are already filled in.

Again, here's the sentence it was based on:

C. The Company possesses, and will continue to possess, information that has been created, discovered or developed by, or otherwise become known to, the Company (including, without limitation, information created, discovered, developed or made known by me during the period of or arising out of my employment by the Company, whether before or after the date hereof) or in which property rights have been or may be assigned or otherwise conveyed to the Company, which information has commercial value in the business in which the Company is engaged and is treated by the Company as confidential.

How about cutting it up (each box on a separate slip of paper) and giving students some string and glue, as well as the original paragraph, so they have to physically move the pieces of paper around and show the relationships with string ...

A bit too TEFLy, perhaps ... but let me know if you try it (or any of the other activities)!

OK, I promised to tell you about the mistake in the first contract clause. It's here:

... any action, suit or proceeding, ... to which any Indemnified Party may be made a party or become otherwise involved or with which any Indemnified Party may be threatened ...

There's a mix-up with prepositions: party to, OK, threatened with, OK, but involved to?

As for the second exercise, my mistake was to have the 'why' arrow pointing from the wrong box. For whatever reason relates to termination of your employment, and not, as I've shown it, required not to. Oh well, you live and learn ...

One last thing: the contracts all come from http://www.onecle.com/, a fantastic free source of thousands of authentic contracts and legal documents.

Needs, lacks and wants

I've been thinking a lot this week and last about student needs. You see I've just taken over a couple of groups of lawyers for a month, while their regular teacher is doing the dreaded CELT-YL qualification. And the book we're using ... English File Upper Intermediate.

Don't get me wrong, it's a fine book. I like the grammar presentations, and the topics are interesting. But last week, after a quick get-to-know-you, I found myself asking the lawyers "What do you know about chimpanzees? Have you ever seen one in a zoo? Can they think?"

Hmmm ...

The weird thing was, though, that I was the only one who seemed distressed by the silliness of asking lawyers to talk about chimps. They were quite happy, and answered all the questions fully and intelligently. It turns out that these students, as well as their bosses (who had arranged the contract with my employer, the British Council), had specifically requested a general English course. I was actually not allowed to touch on legal English. Fair enough ...

And this reminded me of the famous trio of things to consider during a needs analysis: not just NEEDS (what they have to do in their jobs in English) but also their LACKS (what they're currently unable to do) and their WANTS (what will motivate them to study during and between classes). I'd become too focused on NEEDS, and overlooked their WANTS. I also discovered an important LACK during my second lesson with them: serious holes in their understanding of Present Perfect Simple and Continuous (hardly surprisingly, I suppose, given that they're Upper Ints). And that was something they WANTed to overcome.

So I decided to swallow my ESP pride and give them what they lack and what they want.

I've got another group of lawyers who are slightly more complicated. At the start of the course, they and their bosses agreed that they needed to learn about legal English, so we got them copies of International Legal English, and I started working my way through unit 1. But it turns out that what they need and what they want are actually very different. They spend all day dealing with legal problems in English and Polish, and by 5.30pm they're sick of legal English. When I take the book out of my bag they roll their eyes and beg for interesting articles from the internet. Hmmm ...

Here I have a delicate balancing act, because ultimately it's their boss who is the customer, and my brief is to teach them legal English. But I also need to motivate and engage them. So I try to hide little nuggets of legal English in 'internet articles' (such as the one I talked about the other week here). Very tricky.

And what of LACKS? The best example of this was a few years ago when I was working on a course called 'English for European Patent Attorneys' (you see - my imaginative course-naming system doesn't get any better over the years), which I wrote for the British Council in partnership with the European Patent Office (EPO) in Munich. The aim was to have a course for patent attorneys in countries such as Spain, Poland and Italy, which had large populations but whose languages are not official EPO languages.

I was flown to Munich for a couple of days' intense training, including sitting in on some amazing hearings about disputed patents. I learnt about the language needed to apply for a patent, to challenge someone else's patent, to take part in face-to-face hearings, and all the rest of it. Needs, needs, needs. I was even given a big pile of excellent materials developed by the EPO's in-house English teacher.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I came back to Warsaw and started writing and then teaching my wonderful course. It went pretty well, and the patent attorneys were very happy (not least to have a teacher who had more than a very basic idea of what they did). But it was pretty obvious that they knew all the stuff in the course already. This was their job, what they did every day. It was all new to me, and of course they were interested in the materials, but I was focused too much on their NEEDS and not enough on their LACKS.

So what did they lack? What they were desperate for was the language to write to an important client who hadn't paid for work done several months earlier. It turns out that this is extremely common in the world of patents - it's really quite shocking how often this happens. So that was one of the things I added to the course: some model letters with focus on the ability to be firm but polite.

That's of course only one example, but it taught me an important lesson: focus on what they can't do, not on what they do every day.

By the way, last year I wrote up my lesson on delicate-but-firm emails and put it on Professional English Online. You can download it here. I've used patent attorneys as the context, but of course the language is suitable for all sorts of professionals. I've used that lesson with most of my students, no matter what their background is.

Over to you: how do you determine your students' needs, lacks and wants? Are they all equally important? Do students really know what they want? (Or what they need or lack, for that matter.)

Factory tour

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.