Lessons & Classroom Games for Teachers
Yes, really! It works something like this. My client works for a business in Japan – in fact he’s Japanese, in his thirties, and being groomed for the next level of management. Trouble is, this new post would bring him into contact with plenty of ‘foreign’ executives, and he’s always lacked confidence with English. It’s well established that English is the Industry’s global language – the Company’s biggest market is, of course, the USA! How to get round this? Send our man on an intensive course – this can be at a local language school, they could hire someone in for a month, or better still he could be sent to take a ‘full-immersion’ course in an English speaking country.
But how does the teacher take our reluctant hero and enthuse him to the level where he wants to learn English to the next level – confidence and competence? The key words are involving and acquiring. The teacher needs the student to be fully engaged in the learning process – he needs to make the language interesting and relevant to the needs of the student – and then the student acquires the language he needs. The fact is our man knows a lot of business English already – the technical terms he uses are largely international – he understands his job, and knows the terms: it’s putting them together so the foreigners understand his English. He is likely to approach English taught around his job both frustrating and fairly dull, so how to engage him? How to make him want words to paint pictures, have discussions and describe concepts? Simple! What’s his passion? What ‘turns him on’? My client loves Chelsea – a life long fan from Tokyo! Always catches them on the satellite TV in his home, has even got a shirt that he wears on match days. He knows the players, the stats, the results. He has a lot to say on the subject!
That’s where we’ll start with him: watch a match, teacher and student, dissect it, do the full armchair pundit thing over a beer or two. Relax, enjoy. Have you seen the movie “The Thirteenth Warrior” with Antonio Banderas? There’s an excellent scene in that, quite near the beginning, where Banderas’ character (a Mediterranean type) is sitting around a fire with a dozen Vikings, all telling tales, wiling away the hours: the scene starts in a foreign language to the audience (Norse, I guess), but gradually the viewer, seeing the thing through Banderas’ eyes, gets more and more English coming to his ears, until the scene ends with Vikings speaking English. A very clever device, which illustrates my point – get the student relaxed, fully involved, and he’ll WANT to acquire the words he needs to join in. When our man is at this stage, then we introduce the business words on top – let’s talk business together!
Andrew is a qualified TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) teacher, with 15 years experience of the global Automotive Industry as a Sales manager with an International component and systems supplier. For more information about learning English with Andrew at his home in the UK, visit the Lets Talk 2 http://www.lets-talk2.com/_wsn/page2.html website.