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?

My first and worst legal English lesson

We all have bad lessons from time to time, and I've certainly had my share of truly dreadful ones. My top five would definitely include my first lesson on the CTEFLA course (shaking like a leaf) and the last one (when I was told it would have to be perfect or else I'd fail the course ... and it was even worse than the first one).

I'd also have to include my first lesson with teenagers, having taught adults confidently for seven years, I was totally unprepared for their lack of interest in my lesson). And my first - and last - lesson with little kiddies. That's one I've blanked completely from my memory. Never again. Ooooh no.

And then there was my first lesson with lawyers. (Apologies if you've heard my story before - I guess I'm a bit hung up on it).

I'd been asked to write a legal English course for the British Council to prepare students for a new exam, TOLES Advanced. For lesson 1, I'd created a Starter Unit, a kind of get-to-know-you, get-to-know-the-exam lesson.

So there I was, facing a pack of 12 highly intelligent and demanding students who had paid a lot of money to learn from me ... A recipe for disaster.

One of my exercises involved students working in pairs to come up with examples of legal English vocabulary - the idea being that they could share their expertise with each other and I'd facilitate it and it'd all be nice and collaborative. A five-minute throwaway activity.

Problem was, my round-up activity generated more questions than answers, and I was totally out of my depth. For exmple, the students wanted me to explain the difference - the legal difference - between renting, letting and leasing. They wanted me to tell them how to pronounce pupillage (rhyming with village or camauflage?). Is it HARRassment or haRASSment? And so on and so on.

All I could do was write the problem words up on the board and bleat that I'd deal with them all in the next lesson. But every word that went onto the board seemed to generate another half dozen. It was awful. My students could see me for what I was, a clueless fraud, and I just wanted the floor to swallow me up.

Here's a selection of the words I was expected to explain or to pronounce and couldn't (or rather, not to a group of professionals):

Somehow I made it to the end of the lesson.

Anyway, before the next lesson I spent a few hours crashing round the internet, finding the answers to all those questions. In case you aren't familiar with OneLook.com, I heartily recommend it for tasks like this. It has links to all the online dictionaries, so you can be sure to find a specialist or generalist explanation of just about any word, plus pronunciation, etymology, everything. Usually.

As an example, I searched for "escrow" (any guesses how to pronounce that one?) and was offered 58 dictionaries, including one from law.com's great dictionary. And Encarta, where I heard it pronounced. (I know I could also subscribe to TransLegal's new dictionary, which has all the information I could possibly want on legal English vocab. But I'm too mean.)

Then I turned it all into a worksheet, or rather two worksheets, one for each of the next two lessons - there was too much to cover in one lesson. Here's the first one - sorry it's too small to read, and also my IPA has become Greek for some reason. But you get the idea.

And somehow I got away with it. I started my second lesson with a warmer to match the words with the definitions - using my old cut-up-slips-of-paper trick. And it was good fun. I was able to explain the subtle differences, with help from other students. And the students learnt something that they didn't know before. And the rest of the course went fine. Phew!

But ... I learnt never to expose myself to such a situation again. As an ESP teacher, take control of what's going to come up in lessons and what your students are likely to ask you to explain. Open-ended vocab generation exercises are bound to end in tears, unless you really know most of the vocab already. Open-ended discussions are great, though - if you're left with four or five tricky items to come back to next lesson, I'd say that's healthy. Any more than that, and you're in trouble.

Anyway, the point of this post, if there is one, is to reassure teachers who are considering going into ESP (like my new friend Neil, for example), that although it can be scary, with a bit of common sense - and learning from others' mistakes - it's actually not too bad. Lesson 1 may be a disaster, but as long as lessons 2 and 3 are better, you're on your way to becoming a great ESP teacher.

Related posts:

• Can non-experts teach ESP, part 2
• Fun with contracts
• Vocabulary revision with a table and a guillotine

Legal English blogs

There are a couple of new legal English blogs that I've become aware of in the last week of so.

The first one is called Legal English Teacher, and it's been created by my old friend Andrew Nathan. (Observant readers will notice this is the same friend I mentioned a few weeks ago in this post as an example of someone who has become a real expert through years of teaching in a particular ESP field). Not one to shy away from the big issues, Andrew has kicked off with a piece on the plain English vs legalese debate. If you thought that debate had been long settled, think again.

Andrew's blog led me to this one from Wayne Schiess on Legal Writing. This blog seems to be aimed at native English-speaking lawyers and law students, but it has plenty of lively and pertinent ideas useful for those of us who teach the same skills non-natives.

Another new blog that I've just become aware of is Jeremy Wheeler's Anglaw Budapest. Jeremy is in the process of setting up a new centre for legal English in Budapest, and promises to keep us informed of the joys (or otherwise) of getting the school off the ground, as well as tips for teaching legal English. Sounds great.

Also, Translegal has a new Legal English Blog, which seems like a great resource. As well as building our vocabularies (and our students'), we'll find out about common mistakes, drafting tips, recommended reading, and things like that. I noticed this week that Translegal have also launched their own online dictionary for non-native learners of legal English. Excellent ... although there's an annual subscription fee to access all the really exciting content.

I've already mentioned in a previous posting Margaret Marks' nice blog for legal translators, Transblawg.

Finally, I can't forget the trusty old EULETA discussion group. Although it's not a blog per se, it's still the best source for LE tips, lively debates and gossip. Well, perhaps not the gossip, but you never know ...

Please do let me know (in the comments section) of any more good LE blogs. Cheers and happy surfing.

Why I love teaching (part 1)

I seem to spend a lot of time moaning about teaching, dreaming of the day when I can give it all up. Last week I was feeling miserable because our new semester was about to start ...

But sometimes I have a great day and feel that I make a difference to people's lives. Sometimes. I've just had a good day, and I thought it's worth sharing.

My first class tonight was a group of 10 pre-int adults. They really are seriously low level, so I have to work hard to keep everything graded and tight ... but I love it. It's real learning and real teaching. They know things today that they didn't know a few hours ago ... they can do things they couldn't do before.

My second class was legal English. The 10 students seem to come from every field of law there is, and between them they know the whole system. Between them - and that's the point. So the lessons are all about sharing that wealth of knowledge and experience around the classroom. It's wonderful. And as I mentioned in this posting last week, I'm also feeling much more comfortable than ever before teaching legal English, more confident that I know what I'm talking about and that I can add value. Very satisfying.

So ... yeah ... teaching's OK.

PS Don't worry. I'll be grumpy again soon.

Can non-experts teach ESP? Part 2: It all depends … but on what?

A few months ago, I wrote a piece about non-experts in ESP. To use myself as an example, I teach legal English but I’m not a lawyer. So I’d class myself as a non-expert in the subject of law. Should I worry about that? Should I leave it to the ‘experts’? Would I be a better teacher if I had a law degree? Am I ripping off my students by pretending to be something I’m not?

These are all important questions, and I won’t be able to answer them fully in this (hopefully short) post. Today I just want to move the discussion forward slightly. I was also planning to do a review of the various reactions I got to my initial discussion – there were plenty of great ideas, which I want to bring together on this blog. But I’ll save that for a later post (I want to do it properly and not rush it), and concentrate here on clarifying the slippery concepts of ESP and non-experts.

Seeing other people’s thoughts on this question really brought it home to me how diverse ESP is. I’m not just talking about the range of ESP subjects (Legal English, Technical English, English for Biotechnology, English for Counter-Narcotics, etc.), but also the range of teaching situations that we work in (e.g. in-company courses, open courses at private language schools, 1-to-1 lessons with practising professionals, ESP modules in vocational training courses, university degree courses, etc.).

The primary distinction here seems to be whether the aim of the ESP teacher is to develop general English skills (using the context of the students’ subject simply because it’s more interesting than talking about chimpanzees, for example), or whether there’s some element of CLIL (content and language integrated learning, i.e. teaching the subject and English at the same because in many ways the two are inseparable). Subject expertise is clearly more important in the latter than in the former.

There’s also a wide range of sources of course materials that we use (published course books, home-made courses written by the teacher, institution-made courses written centrally, dogme-style student-generated courses, etc.). Here I’d say the relevant distinction is between courses written by the teacher and those written by another person, an expert. It’s one thing to teach well-written materials created by someone else, someone who has decent subject knowledge and awareness of the learners’ professional needs. It’s quite another thing for an EFL teacher to try to write such a course from scratch.

My confidence as a teacher of legal English comes in a large part from the fact that I use a book written by lawyers and tested on lawyers. Five years ago, when I was using course materials I’d written myself, I was on much shakier ground. So although I’d spent six stressful months writing and teaching Advanced Legal English for the British Council, as soon as International Legal English (CUP) was published, I ditched my own course and used the one written by experts.

(I’ll explain one day how I came to write the teacher’s book for that course, despite my non-expertise at the time. In fact, I think being a non-expert really helped me with that book, because it meant I asked and researched lots of stupid questions that more experienced teachers would think were obvious, like “what does tort mean?”).

So my not-very exciting answer to the question “can non-experts teach ESP?” is “it depends”. But the rather more interesting follow-up is “but what does it depend on?”. When I write a blog posting to review other people’s thoughts on this topic, I think the two distinctions above (general English skills vs CLIL; teacher-written courses vs expert-written courses) will help to organise all the ideas.

There’s also, of course, a considerable grey area between the extremes of expert and non-expert that I described in my earlier post. When I called myself a non-expert earlier, I don’t mean I’m completely clueless when it comes to legal English. In fact, after five years of teaching legal English and with two books published on the subject, I’m very often treated as an expert (which can be quite scary, given all the questions I can’t answer off the top of my head). People tend to assume that because my books contain so much knowledge, I must also have that knowledge! In fact, I just copied it off the internet and forgot most of it straight away.

But last week I started unit 1 of International Legal English with a new group – the fourth time I’ve taught that unit in the last 6 months. And you know what? I did know all the answers. I predicted my students’ questions and was able to take the discussion off in new directions, confident that I knew what I was talking about. I also knew exactly how to make the exercises more communicative and fun. But all of this came from (a) having taught the book so many times recently and (b) having a great teacher’s book to support me. (Sorry for my lack of modesty, but the teacher’s book does make life so much easier for teachers.) So I actually felt like an expert – much more so than six months ago, let alone two or five years ago. And this time next year I’ll be further along the non-expert–expert gradient.

To take another example, I have a friend, Andrew, who has been teaching legal English full-time at the highest level for nine years (and who is a follower of this blog, so I’d better watch what I say). He’s also a partner in a legal translation company, so he knows all the right jargon and can speak intelligently on pretty much any law topic. Whenever I speak to him about the law or lawyers’ needs or legal writing or whatever, it’s blindingly obvious that he’s an expert. Partners in the top law firms in Poland trust his expertise and experience. But … he doesn’t have a law degree, so some people might argue that, on paper, he can’t be an expert. (I’d say expertise is about what you know and can do, rather than what pieces of paper you have.

An important point to make is that expertise and experience grow over time, so all experts started out as non-experts. My first legal English lesson was dreadful, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Andrew’s was not-so-hot either.

So my message to would-be ESP teachers is this. There’s no need to feel ashamed about lack of expertise. I’d advise you to start off with skills-based ESP rather than CLIL, and to use a course book rather than write your own materials, if at all possible. You’ll also need to manage expectations carefully (I’ll expand on this in a later post). But if you work hard and learn from your students (two very big ifs), you can move along the grey-scale from non-expert to become a real expert.

PS For more on this issue, see this great article by Alex Case.

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.

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.)

What do words actually mean?

The problem with specialised English is that the same word can mean radically different things to different people. Or, more likely, there’s a subtle but important difference between the way a word is used by specialists in a particular field and by the rest of us. When that happens, it’s fair to ask: who’s right? Who has the right to say what a word really means, the experts or the majority?

I started thinking about this a few weeks ago when I read this message on EULETA’s Yahoo Discussion Group (EULETA is the European Legal English Teachers’ Association, and I strongly recommend the Yahoo group to all teachers of Legal English.) The question was about bankruptcy. In British Legal English, technically only individuals and partnerships can be made bankrupt, while insolvent companies may go into administration or receivership (or administrative receivership …) before perhaps being liquidated. But it seems that many, probably most, speakers of British English, including many respectable journalists, don’t know or don’t care about such distinctions. See, for example, this story from the (British) Financial Times.

So who’s right, the lawyers or the journalists? And where does that leave us poor teachers? Well, you can read the rest of the debate on EULETA by clicking the “next” tab on the right hand side of the page. But my advice is simply to teach that there’s disagreement and it’s up to your students to decide. Some people may see this as a cop-out: we should be the ones to provide definitive answers to our students. But other teachers, myself included, consider the discussion much more important than the answer.

Another example is merger. We all know that a merger is when two companies join together to become one, unlike a takeover, where one company gobbles up another company. Right? Wrong. Look at this extract from West's Encyclopedia of American Law:

merger n. 1) in corporate law, the joining together of two corporations in which
one corporation transfers all of its assets to the other, which continues to
exist. In effect one corporation "swallows" the other, but the shareholders of
the swallowed company receive shares of the surviving corporation. A merger is
distinguished from a "consolidation" in which both companies join together to
create a new corporation.

So what I’d call a merger is actually a consolidation, and what I’d call a takeover is actually a merger. Who’s right? You decide.

I got into a similar mess a few years ago trying to argue with a professional linguist about phrasal verbs. In ELT we talk about phrasal verbs loosely to describe verbs with several parts, and there are several types (e.g. to wake up, to sort sth out, to look after sth, to put up with sth). To a linguist, however, look after is a prepositional verb, and put up with is a prepositional phrasal verb (or something like that). Who’s right, the millions (billions?) of teachers and learners of ELT, or the thousands of experts? Again, you decide.

Anyway, you can see my lesson plan based on the bankruptcy controversy here.

You can join the EULETA Discussion Group here.

The whole debate was actually sparked off by one of TransLegal’s LexMail Words of the Week, which you can see here. Find out more about LexMail here.

So, what do you think? What do these words really mean? And what should we tell our students?

Google News for ESP grammar

Last week I was looking for an up-to-date news story to provide some practice of third conditionals and to put the language into an interesting context. (My students had requested it).

Google News is perfect for things like this. Maybe you've been using it for years, but I only discovered in a few months ago. (I'd assumed the 'News' tab on Google would lead me to news about Google). Different national Google sites will generate different news stories, so I always switch from my default version (Google.pl) to the UK version (Google.co.uk).

So I typed in "would have" (in inverted commas) into the search box, and got a huge list of great news stories, most of which contained third conditionals. (Go on, give it a try now – I’ll wait here for you.)

Here’s the story I chose, based on five rather superficial criteria:

a. It’s short.
b. It’s interesting in terms of content, and therefore should generate some good discussion.
c. It contains two third conditionals, plus plenty of other nice tense-related structures (reported speech, present perfect, etc.).
d. It’s loosely connected with legal English, so I can justify using it with my lawyers.
e. It’s also (arguably) an example of media spin/bias/slant (i.e. we get a rather negative impression of the teacher, perhaps because that will attract more readers, whereas perhaps another version of the same story might present her as a victim). Therefore I can use it with my media exec 1 to 1.

So what can you do with a text like this? (It’s a good idea to have the story open in a separate window, or to print it out, so you can follow my points).

When you print it out, use the printable version, which most news sites seem offer. [I’ll talk about copyright issues in another post, but suffice to say I included all the details about the author, date and web address in my printout.]

Then in the classroom, first of all, get students to read the title to predict what the story is going to be about. Discuss the three meanings of branch (partof a tree; an office of a large firm; and a sector of industry). Check students understand the verb sue, and imagine who a teacher might be suing and why. (One of my students suggested she might be suing the tree).

A simple while-reading task is to check those predictions, but you could add more questions (What exactly happened? What injuries did she suffer? What were the long-term consequences? Whose fault was the incident?) After reading, students can discuss in pairs before you open up the discussion. Do the teacher’s symptoms (tiredness, memory loss and problems multi-tasking) sound serious to you? How could they be assessed / proved? Does she have a chance of getting the money? Is this an example of Britain becoming a litigious society, or does the teacher have a good case? Does the article present a balanced view of the story, or are we being manipulated by the choice of language and the structure of the text?

Now is the time to check vocabulary problems, including drawing attention to useful collocations (to sustain an injury, an impaired memory, a high threshold, to deny liability), prepositions (to sue sb for sth, to glance at sth, adjacent to sth, to deal with sth, reliant on sb, to have an impact on sth) and idioms (it’s with our solicitors = we’re preparing to fight this case in court). This would actually work well as a matching exercise, matching the first part of these collocations in one column (or on slips of paper) with the second parts.

As a grammar lover, I can’t resist analysing al the great grammar in this story – but it’s important only to do this with students who also like grammar.

• Reduced relative clause: A teacher (who was) injured by a falling branch is suing …
• Preposition + verb + ing in passive: Since being injured, she has not worked (= Since she was injured …)
• Reported speech: Her solicitor said she had not worked and suffered from …
• Subject-to-subject raising: She is said to have trouble multi-tasking (= It is said that she has trouble)
• Third conditionals: If there had been …; If someone had just walked along …
• What-clefting for emphasis: What we’re trying to do is to restore … (= We’re trying to restore).

The nice thing about all of those structures is that they're great for transformations, so an obvious exercise would be an FCE-style transformations exercise:

1. A falling branch injured a schoolteacher, who is suing the EA. [BY] (A schoolteacher ...)
2. "Since she was injured, she hasn't worked" said her solicitor. [BEING] (Her solicitor ...)

You get the idea.

A final task would be to copy the whole text into a word document, and replace all the tensed verbs with gaps: A schoolteacher injured by a falling branch _____ (sue) the EA ...

I say 'would be', because copying and changing someone else's work is right on the borderline between what's acceptable and what's not in terms of copyright. It might be safer to use a black marker on a printout of the original ...

So there you have it - a quick and easy grammar lesson. Not especially authentic or heavy (in terms of legal English), so I wouldn't build a whole course out of texts like these, but from time to time they do the job well. Comments are very welcome, especially if you can think of any other things to ask Google News to generate grammar lesson.