190 Reviews

BUSINESS ENGLISH TEACHER’S RESOURCE BOOK. Sharon Nolan and Bill Reed. Longman, 1992, 137 pp.

Reviewed by Rang Chen

Business English teachers face several challenges: how to make the course relevant to a class of students from diverse backgrounds, how to appear cred- ible while having little knowledge about the business world, and how to identify students’ language needs. The ambitious Business English Teacher’s Resource Book (BETRB) aims to help solve these problems, and it seems able to suc- ceed to a large extent.

BETRB contains five sections: The Business World, The Organisation, Do- ing the Job, Working with People, and Self-management. Each section consists of several units (units totaling 411, each of which are made up of four stages.

The first stage of each unit is Initial Task, which asks the students to write notation about a certain aspect of their business defined by the topic of the unit on a worksheet provided. In Unit 1, The Market, for example, the stu- dents are directed to write about their product or service and choose from a list of words such as stable, growing, and shrinking, those which best describe the state of the market for their product or service.

During the second stage, Communicative Task, the teacher is to monitor the class discussion and make notes on the observation sheet of students’ use of language, whiIe the students, either in pairs or groups, exchange information they have written down on their worksheets. In Unit 1, the students are asked to tell each other about their products or services, to explain why they have selected a particular word from the worksheet, and to talk about factors that influence the behavior of their customers.

The teacher is supposed to have classified her observation notes into “Good Use of Language” and “Language to Be Corrected” before the third stage, Language Feedback, begins. During this stage, s/he will acknowledge good language use, correct errors, and present new language needed. The students are required to write new and corrected language in their personal language files to be used in the last stage, Transfer.

The Transfer stage typically requires the students to prepare a presentation on the topic of the unit, again, with the help of a worksheet, although, in some units, they are to work further with the worksheet or to discuss a relevant reading that the teacher has selected.

The authors’ aims are very well reflected in these four stages. Stage 1, Initial Task, draws on the students’ own student by having them think about and provide information on their own business. In Stage 2, Communicative Task, students are exchanging information, again, about their own business. During these two stages, the teacher is an organizer and observer; s/he does not have to worry about her lack of knowledge in business, since the students have enough business knowledge to carry out class discussion themselves.

However, the teacher needs to have credibility, after all, and Stage 3, Language Feedback, provides him/her a forum to display his/her authority on

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language. The learning-centeredness of the book stands out once more in this stage: She is not teaching areas of language predetermined by some arbitrarily designed curriculum. All she needs to do is, based on her observation, ac- knowledge accurate and appropriate language use of the students in their own actual performance, correct errors they have made when talking about things they are interested in, and suggest further language on the same topic for the students to use.

The last stage, Transfer, is to consolidate what the students have learned from the previous stages and to expand their ability to talk about the same topic which has motivated them in the tirst place. Thus, we see a smooth progres- sion through the four stages, effectively helping the students in certain areas of language use.

Another strength of the book is its ability to cope with the likely diverse background of the student population by allowing students to talk about their own business with one another, on issues that are universal to all businesses. Regardless of what business a student is in, she is bound to deal with most of the themes in the book, such as the future of business (Unit 21, company structure (Unit S), working conditions (Unit 111, problem solving (Unit 241, and working with the boss (Unit 32). Thus, we can envisage an engaging discussion of product quality (Unit 19) between, say, a Japanese automobile engineer and a salesperson of a Saudi Arabian oil company.

Mention should also be made of Needs Analysis, a separate unit, but in the same format as other units. It asks students to talk about their job, helping them to identify work-related themes (roughly corresponding to the titles of the units), and to assess their language ability and needs. The teacher is then to choose units from the book which best cater to these needs, thus being able to tailor-make his/her course.

BETRB has some unique features. The worksheets are well designed and photocopiable. The unit table of contents provides information, not only on the titles and page numbers of the units, but also the level of proficiency each unit is suited for, the time it takes, whether there is a presentation assignment, and whether it works with a cohesive group or otherwise. The teacher gets many useful teaching suggestions. At the end of each unit, for instance, there is a Remark section which offers alternative ways of carrying out a particular task and how to use the unit in a one-to-one situation. The Introduction section, which runs 11 pages, tells the teacher not only how to carry out each activity, but also how to correct student errors and how to take affective factors into consideration, in order to establish a nurturing class atmosphere.

With all these characteristics, BETRB is a showcase of major theories of the currently fashionable communicative language teaching approach. Com- pared to earlier texts of its kind, such as Grosse and Grosse’s Case Studies in International Business (1988), Matthews’ Business Interactions (1987), and Ardo’s Management English (1986), BETRB is a better book than Grosse and Grosse or Matthews, and as good as Ardo in being truly communicative in nature, although it lacks the variety of activity found in Ardo (see Chen 1988, 1991).

192 Reviews

BETRB seems to have, primarily, two weaknesses. Fist, it remains doubt- ful whether students will have learned the kind of English they need by the end of the course. This is seen in several aspects. First, at the beginning of each unit, the teacher is told what language s/he should focus on when observing students. Yet, the suggestion is often too vague to be of much help. In Unit 4, for example, the focus suggested is “describing social customs.” Since the unit is on “Cultural differences in society,” I, as a teacher, would have no way to decide what I should be focusing on, since the students would be supposedly talking about social customs all the time, and the structures that are used to describe social customs are perhaps too many for any grammarian to enumerate.

Second, the book leaves the task of offering new language entirely to the teacher. I would have no idea of what to offer the students for describing social customs in Unit 4. The verb to be? The use of tenses? Transitive vs. intran- sitive verbs? Phrasal vs. prepositional verbs? Relative clauses? Adverbial clauses? Noes clauses? It seems to me that nearly all structures of English can be used for describing social customs, and without specific help, I would be at a total loss.

The third reason for my doubts concerning the language work in the book is that, even if the teacher is able to provide the required language, the consol- idation of such language is too limited. What the students are required to do with language is to write down the language in their personal file and use it in the fourth task, Transfer, which runs approximately 16-15 minutes. There are no exercises whatsoever for the students to practice. This i~o~g of language work is well reflected in the authors’ dubious remark that “Amity to carry out the tasks depends on motivation and experience rather than any particular language level” (p. 5).

The second weakness of the book lies in its usability. In the Communicative Task stage of each unit, the teacher is required to observe students talking in pairs or groups, to make language notes on his/her observation sheet, to classify them into different categories, and to be ready to offer new language for the next stage, Transfer - all in a matter of 10-15 minutes. If s/he fails to do any of the above, as I suspect s/he will at times, p~tic~arly when s/he has ten pairs in a class of twenty to worry about, she may not be able to continue the class. I cannot imagine a greater disaster than this.

In sum, I recommend BETRB to business English teachers experienced in communicative language teaching, but warn them that they might have to provide supplementary language exercises and might have to try it out before actually using it in class. BETRB can also be a useful supplement for the inexperienced who want to try new tricks in their classrooms.

Ardo, 2. (1986). built Englbh. Budapest: Allami Konyvterjeszto Mat. Chen, R. (1988). Review of case studies in international management. English

for Specific Putposes, 7, 217-220.

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Chen, R. (1991). Review of business interactions and management English. English for Specific Purposes, 10, 61-64.

Grosse, C., & Grosse, R. E. (1988). Case studies in international business. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Matthews, C. (1987). Business interactions. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice- Hall.

Rong Chen is assistant professor of Linguistics at California State Univer- sity, San Bernardino. He studied ESP teaching and linguistics at the University of Lancaster, U.K., and completed his doctorate in linguistics at Ball State University, U.S.A.