Aviation English part 1: The purest form of ESP?

In a much earlier post on this blog, I raised the idea that there are basically two approaches to ESP course design: English for … and English through …

Just to recap, with an English for … approach, we are teaching learners the specific language and skills they need in order to function effectively at work in English. The starting point is the needs analysis, which generates a series of situations where the learner may need to use English, whether in speech or in writing. There’s a strong emphasis on functional language presented in context and skills work, especially role-plays, to practise it.

With an English through … approach, on the other hand, the focus is on developing learners’ level of English, and the ESP field simply provides the context. Such a course might be built around, for example, a traditional grammar syllabus, but the examples and practice sentences could be related to the ESP field. There’s a strong emphasis on learning vocabulary and reading articles about the ESP field. 

Because the books I’ve worked on have all been skills-based, I’ve tended to stay around the English for … side. That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with an English through … approach. I think there’s a place for both. 

In fact, what I’ve come to realise is that it’s better to think in terms of a scale, with extreme English for … at one end, and extreme English through … at the other, and most ESP fields, and therefore courses, somewhere in between. Not long ago, I wrote a blog post about Financial English, arguing that there’s not much you can do with it apart from vocabulary and reading texts, so I’d put Financial English somewhere near the English through ... extreme. Of course, surely there’s still some useful functional / situational stuff you can do, but it's hard to argue that Financial English is a proper genre.

Further out on that wing, I’d say, is English for Oil and Gas, which is a great topic for vocab and reading texts, but I really can’t imagine any situations that both an oil rig engineer and an oil trader might both find themselves in, and therefore much in the way of functional / situational language to include in such a course.

Legal English, on the other hand, is out towards the other wing. There’s plenty of functional / situational language shared by all lawyers, and this especially true when it comes to written legal English, especially the language of contracts, which is a recognizable genre of English, with its own grammar rules (wherewith and all that) and style.

Where’s all this leading? Well, for me, as an English-for guy, there’s one ESP field that beats all the others: Aviation English: the language that all pilots and air traffic control officers (ATCOs) use to communicate with each other around the world. The language is English in the sense that it uses English words, but it also has its own very specific grammar, vocabulary, spelling and pronunciation rules. Or, to echo the title of my blog, it's a really specific English.

Take a look at the numbers 0–9 in aviation English: zero, wun, too, tree, fower, fife, six, seven, ait, niner. Wun, too and ait are pronounced as normal numbers, but the spelling is designed to discourage pilots and ATCOs from trying to pronounce them the way they are spelled. Tree is easier to say than three. Fower (which rhymes with flower) also avoids a tricky vowel sound. Niner has an extra syllable to avoid confusion with five … sorry, fife. Cool, huh?

The grammar of aviation English is also a bit quirky: ‘Request taxi for departure’ is not an imperative (Please can you request a taxi) but an actual request (I am requesting permission to use the taxiways to get to the holding point for departure). In a way, it makes sense to mark a request by starting with the word request, but when you first come across it, it’s pretty weird.

One final example: here’s a weather forecast, which all pilots and ATCOs would understand immediately:

METAR KBUF 121755Z AUTO 21016G24KT 180V240 1SM R11/P6000ft -RA BR BKN015 OVC025 06/04 A2990.

I won’t go through it all, but 121755Z is simply the date (the 12^th) and time (17.55 GMT). 16G24KT is the wind speed: 16 knots, gusting (G) to 24 knots. 1SM is the visibility: one statute mile. And -RN BR describes the weather conditions: light (-) rain (RN) and mist (BR).

So … it really does seem to be a different language, which is why in my title I’ve called it the purest form of ESP. And it’s also why I had a bit of an identity crisis: how could I call myself an ESP all-rounder when, never having taught or studied aviation English, I had such a big gap in my ESP portfolio.

So that was why, about two years ago, I couldn’t turn down the chance to co-author the teacher’s book for Flightpath: Aviation English forPilots and ATCOs, which came out earlier this year.

Fortunately, my co-author was Philip Shawcross, a world-class expert on aviation English, and the President of the ICAEA (International Civil Aviation English Association).

So it meant my main job was ask Philip thousands of really stupid questions – the sort of questions that a new teacher of aviation English might be expected to ask. This was a technique I’d perfected while working on my legal English teacher’s books, but it still meant a year of very very hard work for all involved. But I’m very proud of the finished product.

Now all I need to complete my ESP portfolio is something on oil and gas … only kidding.

Related posts:
Two approaches to ESP course design
Financial English - if such a thing exists
Where was I?

Financial English ... if such a thing exists

I'll explain my strange title in a minute. This post will be a bit of a mish-mash of my thoughts on financial English. First some background.

 

This time last week I finished a series of presentations around Poland on Financial English. One week, 4 cities, 8 presentations (and I still managed to do two days' teaching too).

 

Why me? Well, a few years ago I was asked by my colleagues at the British Council to prepare 3-hour presentations for the two new Cambridge ESOL exams, ILEC (International Legal English Certificate) and ICFE (International Certificate in Financial English). So I went a bit wild with the Powerpoint and created the presentations - basically talking teachers through the exams, with guidance on how to prepare students for each task in each paper.

 

Then last year I did a tour to promote ILEC around Poland, using a whittled down version of my monster presentation. This year it was ICFE's turn. I had to squeeze my 150-slide masterpiece into 45 minutes. Not an easy task. I actually quite liked the big presentation, so it was quite distressing to have to delete so many slides.

 

The point about the ICFE is that it's an English exam, not a finance exam. It's designed to provide an accurate assessment of a candidate's skills and level of English in a financial context. It doesn't test their knowledge and skills of finance itself. With that important proviso, I think it's a pretty good exam. Maybe one day I'll offer deeper thoughts on ICFE and ILEC.

 

For the ICFE tour, I was also asked to do a second presentation in each city (Wroclaw, Krakow, Warsaw and Gdansk), this time on behalf of my other main 'employer', Cambridge University Press. (I should point out that I'm not actually employed by either the BC or CUP, but almost all my work is for one or the other).

 

I was promoting the new CUP Financial English course, called, er, Cambridge Financial English. It's designed as a blended learning course, based on the idea that many finance professionals are busy and stressed and in need of a flexible learning solution.

 

I've never used the materials to teach, but they look excellent. What I like best is the bank of 40 short video clips - a mixture of functional/situational dialogues (i.e. finance people doing their jobs, interacting with colleagues or clients in English) and informational listenings (e.g. news reports, interviews, etc.). The course looks very thorough, professional and useful.

 

I won't explain the whole course now - there's a nice demo video on the website. And I won't try to sell it to you!

 

But I did spot a great business opportunity, which I was very tempted to keep to myself and make a fortune ... if only I had time to exploit it. So here's the lowdown (don't tell anyone).

 

I think the site, http://www.financialenglish.org/, must get a lot of traffic (since it's also the site for the exam, and plenty of finance pros and students are likely to visit). Interested clients go to the site and want to register for the course, so they check the 'list of tuition providers'. And here's what they see:

 

 

Yes ... that's the complete list as of today. One in London and one in Kiev. So my idea was this: I could put the name of my language school here at no cost to myself and wait for the customers to come to me, knocking on the door and desperate to give me their money. No cost, no risk. The only problem is that I don't have my own school, and I don't really have the stomach to set one up and manage one. I prefer writing.

 

Anyway, I promised I wouldn't try to sell you anything (and I swear I'm not being paid to promote the course now), but if you've got a language school or you want to attract customers for financial English, I think this is too good an opportunity to miss.

 

Right ... I promised I'd explain my strange title. You see, I've always felt a bit uneasy about Financial English, and I'm not 100% sure it actually exists. My own main ESP area, legal English, has many grammatical and stylistic features that make it different from all other Englishes, as well as all the specialised vocabulary. The same could be said of Technical English (especially technical writing, i guess), Aviation English, Shipping English, Marketing English (especially the language of advertising). The same goes for Medical English: the skill of speaking with patients in delicate situations is probably unique to that set of professions. (My talk at the IATEFL conference in a couple of weeks is focused on the language nurses use - a fascinating topic that I'll blog about soon).

 

But financial English? Of course there's plenty of jargon. In fact, my main contact with financial English is the Jargonbusters I write twice a month for Professional English Online. (In case you're not familiar with them, they're lesson ideas based around a hot new vocab item, mainly from the world of finance.) So I know all about CoCo bonds, Clawback provisions, Legacy loans, Moral hazard and Quantitative easing, for example.

 

But I also know that finance people don't spend all day discussing terms like these, and that, interesting as they are, they're only the tip of the iceberg in terms of what finance pros need.

 

So what exactly do they need? Hmmm ... here's where I get to my strange title. My gut feeling (based on no evidence whatsoever) is that finance people need lots of generic business skills (speaking, writing, negotiating, reports, meetings, etc.), plus a bit of finance vocab. Of course specific branches of finance, like banking or accounting or insurance or whatever, may have other exciting needs, but I'm thinking about needs that unite the whole spectrum of finance people. And all I can come up with is ... business English in a finance context.

 

Even within a sub-field like banking, surely the front-office staff have radically different language needs from the back-office staff. And those back-office staff in turn will have different needs depending on which particular back office they work in. Retail banking is different from investment banking, which in turn is different from the world of national banks.

 

So my question to you: am I missing something? Does financial English exist or not?

 

Perhaps it doesn't matter to you: of course you can create great courses for your own individual students and groups, and you'll find plenty of language needs so you can prepare great courses. My own crisis comes from my job as an ESP editor: I have to find common threads for each of the ESP fields that are taught in my books, beyond easy things like jargon and generic business skills.

 

Anyway, I'll leave it there. I'd be very interested to hear your opinions, espcially if you have more expereince in financial English than me (not difficult, as I have next to none).

 

Related posts:

• Imagery in Financial English
• Financial English videos
• Conferences and presentations

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 ...

Financial English videos

This week I've been spending a lot of time watching and analysing suitable videos for Financial English, so I thought I'd share a couple of clips with you, and pass on my ideas for very simple lessons.

The reason I've suddenly taken an interest in Financial English is that I write activities every month for Professional English Online, Cambridge University Press's site for teachers of Business English and ESP. This month I felt it was time to bite the bullet of Financial English, an area that I'd managed to avoid up to now. I chose to do a video lesson because, again, this is something I'd avoided. Also, the videos on YouTube are so good as introductions to the subject of Financial English.

So here are a couple of great tutorials:

• Untangling Credit Default Swaps: One of a series of tutorials from Paddy Hirsch, Senior Editor at Marketplace, illustrating various complex financial concepts using metaphors, diagrams and simple examples. All of his tutorials are excellent, but this is the one that helped me most.
• Collateralized Debt Obligations: another clear and simple illustration of a complex topic, this time from the Khan Academy. The Khan academy seems to be a great source of knowledge on a wide range of subjects - check out all their videos on YouTube.
• The Crisis of Credit Visualized: my personal favourite, and the one I chose for the activity on Professional English Online (mainly because the visuals are so much cooler).

There are also some nice comedy sketches about the financial crisis, including plenty from John Bird and John Fortune (such as this one - perfect apart from some mild swearing towards the end). The financial sketch that really made me laugh was this one from Little Britain - although it's probably not ideal for your financial whiz-kids.

So, coming back to the tutorials, how can you use them in class? Well, it's all a question of aims - a subject I'll go into much more deeply in a later post. To me, there are up to four valid aims here,

1. to provide listening practice and/or teach listening skills;
2. to introduce/teach/practise some financial terminology;
3. to improve your and your students' understanding of difficult concepts;
4. to teach some techniques and/or functional language that can be transferred to real life speaking situations.

So, taking the first aim first, students will get something out of just watching a clip. But they don't really need to pay you for that privelege! Your job is to manage the process so they get more out of it than they would without your help. That means breaking it into manageable chunks (probably no more than 2 minutes each), and providing questions that will support them rather than trick/test them. A nice technique here is true/false statements or yes/no questions, where you focus the student's attention on a particular fragment of the video and they only have to understand generally what's going on in order to answer your question, and they only have to write one letter (T/F or Y/N) while they're listening. At the end of the section, they discuss their answers with a partner (make sure they see this as speaking practice rather than just a list of true-false-false-true) and finally go through them with the class. If your questions are well designed, your students should now have a very good idea of what the whole section was about - and they'll have the impression that they understood much more than they perhaps really did. Very good for confidence. As I say, use your questions to teach rather than trick.

What about listening skills (as opposed to just practice)? The obvious one here is the skill of prediction - knowing what you're going to hear before you listen. Here again, the questions will be a great help: students discuss what they expect the answers to be, and then watch the clip to check. Also, get them to predict at the end of each section what will happen next.

Coming on to my second aim, financial terminology, this will make the student feel they've got something meaty out of the lesson. Rather than just "We watched a video - it was quite interesting", they'll tell their friends "We learnt some new words". (Well, perhaps they won't really tell their friends ... but these are finance people, don't forget). The best thing to do here is a gapfill: transcribe a handful of sentences from each section of the video and gap the target vocab. Put all the gapped words in a box below the sentences, and get students first to predict and then to watch the video a second time to check their answers. That second viewing is really important, by the way, because that's when they'll feel that they understand everything, and they'll feel great about it.

My third aim, understanding difficult concepts, isn't really an aim ... let's call it a secondary aim. I think students will appreciate learning something new about their own subjects, or perhaps they'll like showing off that they already knew it. But you, as a teacher, can really benefit from the kind of close analysis that comes from creating a lesson from a video clip.

My finaly aim is about techniques and functional language. Some good techniques incuded in the videos above are: using diagrams, using metaphors, using simplistic examples, etc. The language technique best illustrated by these clips is that of discourse markers to signal and manage an explanation, things like:

• In other words ...
• So, as you can see,
• But have a look at what's happened over here.
• Rhetorical questions: But what happens if we ...?
• Clefting: What I'm going to talk about next is ...; What happens is that ...

So there we have it. I'll end with a brief summary of how to manage a sample 1-2 minute extract from a video:

1. Students predict answers to T/F statements in pairs. Support them with vocabulary from the statements. Brief feedback in class.
2. First viewing to check.
3. Students discuss (and I mean discuss) in pairs. Feed back in class. Focus on the content and students' reaction to it - not just the language.
4. Students attempt gapfill in pairs.
5. Second viewing to check.
6. Students discuss in pairs. Feed back in class.
7. Predict with the class what will happen next.

That's enough for now. Good luck.

Jeremy

PS Please let me know if you use any of these ideas in class, or if you can recommend any of your own Financial English videos. I'll post a link to my activity on Professional English Online when it appears there.