The business learner is an adult!

I am posting here a section of a white paper that I will shortly publish on corporate English learning, or business English.

I will talk about the subject in Spanish, since Humberto asked about this issue. Spanish is a language that I rarely if ever use, although I enjoy listening to it and reading in it. So forgive my clumsiness. The podcast can be heard on my other blog. I also added podcasts in French and Chinese there for those who are interested.

Excerpt:

To improve the return on investment in learning business English, it is necessary to adopt new approaches that take into consideration two essential characteristics of the business learner.

1)       The business English learner is an adult, not a high school student.

There is increasing evidence that adults are better language learners than children, when all language skills are considered. This is true even for older adults, see Mary Schleppegrell  The Older Language Learner.

There is no age barrier to language improvement. However, many adults have come to believe that they are already past the optimum age for language learning. These attitudes represent a major obstacle to effective language improvement. Forcing adults to do the kinds of drills that were developed for use in traditional classrooms will only increase the adult learner’s resistance to language learning.

Business English learning needs to be built around the strengths of the adult learner. The adult has a wide range of knowledge and experience. Learning activities should focus on interesting content that is meaningful to the business learner. The learner should be allowed to choose what to study. This meaningful content should include but not be limited to business related content. Business terms are often the easiest to learn, and should be learned from content that is relevant to the business English learner’s area of activity. In addition, the business English learner should be allowed to explore a wide range of content in English to create a broader ability to communicate in English. The choice of learning content should be the learner’s.

The initial priority in improving English skills should be on increasing the understanding of written and spoken English through intensive listening and reading activities. This is in line with recent views about the importance of meaningful input to language acquisition.(see Krashen et.al.)

There should be minimum pressure on learners to produce correct English, until they have greatly increased their familiarity with English, through intensive and effective input activities. Forcing learners to improve the accuracy of spoken and written English too early will often be counterproductive, creating bad habits and negative attitudes amongst learners.

Speaking opportunities in English should be arranged with small groups of no more than four learners and one native speaker. They can be face to face or via the Internet. These should not be instructional sessions as are common in the classroom. Instead they need to be casual and stress free without too much correction. These should be discussions on subjects of interest to the learner, including discussions about business. Native speaker tutors can provide feedback, but mostly should just let learners practice communicating in a relaxed and enjoyable way. These discussions will usually stimulate learners to do more intensive reading and listening, activities that learners can carry out on their own at little cost.

It is the correction of writing that represents the best opportunity to improve the accuracy of the learners’ business English usage. Here again, correcting meaningful writing, including actual business correspondence, is more useful than assigning artificial activities like exercises or tests, which are typical of classroom and traditional language learning. Business English learners should be encouraged to use the same style of English whether writing or speaking, in order that the practice of these two language skills can be mutually reinforcing.