Tuesday 19 October 2010

What general principles do you apply to the teaching of ESP, whatever the field?

The 2010 BESIG conference is fast approaching, and I've been busy preparing the talk that I'll be giving alongside my good friend and long-time colleague Mark Ibbotson. Mark's a fantastic Business English and ESP author, responsible for the Business Start-up series (CUP) as well as Cambridge English for Engineering and Professional English in Use Engineering (both also CUP).

As Mark and I have both written books in the Cambridge English for … series – him on Engineering and me on Marketing – we thought it would be interesting to look at what, if any, commonalities existed between the teaching of English for Engineering and English for Marketing. That lead to the following talk title: Different fields, common ground: From marketing to engineering, some thoughts on the ground rules for successful ESP teaching across all fields.

While researching the talk, I've been giving a lot of though to what, if anything, works as an overarching methodology for the teaching of ESP. I want to avoid being too prescriptive, so I've come up with a list of things that are important to me, as a teacher of ESP and a writer and editor of ESP materials. This list is very much a work in progress (and it's highly subjective), but at the moment it looks like this:

1. Engage your students not only as language learners but also as professionals.
2. Choose your focus correctly – i.e. vocabulary (what type?), skills / functional language, grammar (general grammar or task-specific grammar), etc.
3. Think about who your students need to communicate with (their "web of relationships") and the channels in which that communication takes place (written, spoken, etc.). Use that as a basis for the texts and contexts you're going to focus on in your course.
4. Teach language not theory.

So that's what I'm working from at the moment, and I'll be fleshing those points out between now and the conference. But what would you add to that list? What principles do you think could be applied to the teaching of ESP, regardless of the field?

Tuesday 12 October 2010

Marketing vocabulary of the week: 'strategy' vs. 'tactics'

Strategy is the direction an organisation will take to achieve its objectives. Tactics are the specific activities that an organisation does in order to implement its strategy. The marketing strategy should always be decided before the tactics, or the tactics will not have focus or a clear objective. Strategy is longer-term than tactics. Tactics change more often than strategy.

Example usage (extract from a meeting to discuss the development of an organisation's marketing plan):

"OK, well first let me thank you again for all of the hard work you’ve done on the marketing plan so far. I think we’ve done an excellent job of assessing where we are now and where we want to be in 12 months’ time. What I want to talk about today is how we get there. How are we going to implement our strategy? What tactics are we going to employ? That kind of thing."

(Taken from Cambridge English for Marketing, Unit 3 [The marketing plan 2: audit and objectives])