Only a small fraction of business meetings take place in a meeting room. Instead they are much more apt to take place in an environment like a restaurant, or a corridor. They are also likely to use communication styles and skills seldom taught in standard business English courses. |
David Evans has immersed himself in the world of business as a teacher, BBC broadcaster and best-selling Longman author
It is obvious there’s a problem, but it’s not so clear what to do about it. Most top executives in Thailand will readily admit their employees lack strong English language skills. Worse yet, many report that despite the considerable sums spent on English improvement programmes, the problem remains.
It’s not all that surprising. Learning a language is difficult and time-consuming in the first place. And among busy adults, failure is easily as a common as success.
There is also the problem that people in business often have little idea of what kind of programme they need. Similarly, the English teachers they hire may only have a vague idea of what kind of programme to provide.
Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to call on a consultant with expertise in both areas? Enter David Evans.
Discovering international English
 Nowadays David Evans frequently travels making presentations on business English Archarn Terry caught up with him at the recent Thai TESOL conference in Chiang Mai. |
Evans started his career as a researcher for the Financial Times. He then worked in London and Paris as a trainer for what must have been a very high-powered organisation.
"It was an extraordinary job," he says, "because you would turn up on a Monday morning and somebody would say ‘This is your student for the day, he’s the Peruvian finance minister.’ Or ‘This is your student, he’s the Portuguese minister of defense.’ Then you might ask (another student), ‘Why are you learning English?’ and he would answer ‘Well, it’s my turn to be president of Switzerland next year.’
After a short stint as Director of Studies for one of the UK’s top executive language centres, Evans joined the BBC as a radio producer. During his BBC career he produced and presented hundreds of programmes, many of them focusing on the language of the workplace.
After leaving the BBC, Evans says, he had a unique opportunity to explore how English is used around the world as the international language of business.
"I produced a series a couple of years ago as a joint venture – looking at how business people used English for work purposes. I interviewed people from all over the world – from Singapore, the Gulf, Germany, Latin America. They were non-native speakers but were using English for business purposes.
One of the programme’s most striking findings, Evans says, is that people found it easier to do business in English than in their own languages. They said it was possible to almost take on a completely new personality when they started speaking a new language, whereas in their own language, they would be confined by the image that other people had of them.
"They found that when they spoke English, people didn’t mind when they made mistakes. People accepted that they might say things that were inappropriate. This gave them a great freedom to say exactly what they thought, which they couldn’t do in their own language," Evans says.
Interestingly, says Evans, "if you listen to the kind of English that most non-native speakers speak, it is very hard to say that they are speaking British English or they’re speaking American English.
"What they’re speaking, I would argue, is an international English– which is a restricted vocabulary and a restricted set of structures. And they’re using an accent which, I think, owes much more to interference of their mother tongue than it does to any notion of how British people or American people speak."
What is business English?
One of the vexing problems for those involved with "business English" or "English for business" is defining how it differs from general English. The grammar is the same and so, for the most part, is the vocabulary.
Evans tackles this question from a different angle. "I think business English is more about communication skills," he says. I would say that the way in which it differs from general English, is that in general English, often the criterion for success in speaking the language is ‘How accurate are you?’
"Business English has different criterion for success. It’s how effective you are as a communicator. And that’s what business English is all about, it’s about teaching effective communication.
For course designers, Evans says, "it’s a matter of thinking practically about the way business people – and indeed working people – need the English language. Which situations occur in which English is important for them? And what is the language used in those situations.
"That’s why in business English teaching you can come up with a classic list of business communication skills. Most business English courses will teach telephoning, making a presentation, negotiating, attending a meeting. You can add the skill of delegating, the skill of motivating. You can have the skill of explaining causes and effects."
From observation to practice
In some areas of teaching English for business, says Evans, the procedures are fairly straightforward. Telephoning, for example, is a very basic skill. "The key difficulty that learners have is when the phone rings and you pick it up and somebody’s speaking English on the other end," he says.
"You can actually predict that they are going to be asking to speak to somebody. The next step, obviously, is dealing with that particular problem, can they speak to that person or not. If they can’t, there are normally four or five reasons to explain that. The next step is either taking a message if they can’t speak to the person, or putting them through. Again, you can identify the steps. Then having identified the steps, you can teach the language that goes with each step."
Meetings, on the other hand, are far more complex. Here Evans believes, English teachers often have "an over-formal model" of what business language is and about what situations business people find themselves in.
"It is true, he says, that there are formal business meetings which take place around a meeting table with a chairperson, agenda, minutes and so on. But I think they only represent a small fraction of the number of business meetings that are held in the real business world.
"I think we need to wake up to the fact that when a lot of people attend a meeting they will often find that meeting taking place in the corridor, in a restaurant, in all sorts of different environments. And they won’t be just exchanging formal language, interrupting formally, exchanging opinions politely.
"A lot of the time they’ll be discussing ideas, or they’ll be reporting on recent developments. There’s a whole range of different communication skills and styles which occur in business meetings which are not often taught in business English. And perhaps they should be," he observes.
Evans also finds weakness in the way many teachers deal with giving presentations. "Nearly all the books tell learners to say what they’re going to say, say it and then say it again. It’s a good structure, but I think the problem is that it’s not very helpful when it comes to putting over the message. It doesn’t give a lot of help to learners to make sure they’re persuasive when they stand up in front of people, that they make it memorable.
"There are techniques that you can use. You can make sure that the students use their voices in the right way; you can make sure the students look right when they’re doing it. There has been some research done, I think, which suggests that about seven percent of the impact of a presentation comes from the words that are used. Ninety-three percent of it is coming from body language, how things are put across and so on.
One more area that Evans says business English courses tend to lag behind is business correspondence. In the real world of business "everything has completely changed in a very very short time, just in the last four years. People have suddenly stopped sending business letters, they’ve stopped sending faxes, they’ve stopped writing memos. All that kind of communication is now dealt with by email."
Selecting a programme
This background information is helpful, but what can companies do to put it to use? How can they seek out teachers or schools to implement a modern and effective business English programme for their employees? Here Evans has a number of suggestions.
"I think first of all, you need to have a reasonable idea why people in your company need English – what are they going to use the language for – because schools need to know that. They need to know if these people are going to be travelling, whether they’re going to be using it for a corporate language, whether they are using it because they have trouble with email and the Web. I think then the company needs to know what kind of materials the school will use and what kind of methods the school is going to employ.
"Business English, I maintain, is about communication so you need to be sure that the school is using some kind of communicative method of teaching the language. There’s no point in taking a business English course unless you are going to use the language in speech. If you’re just going to sit in the class and read texts, that’s no good. You have to make sure the learners are speaking.
"Certainly a company interested in these kinds of things should ask schools what their view of a business meeting is because meetings in the past were very much about exchanging information. That exchange of information is taking place electronically these days. Meetings tend to have a much more dynamic role.
Similarly, says Evans, the company should ask schools about their view of the purpose of presentations. "Today, presentations tend not to be about facts and figures. That tends to happen much more on the Internet, the Web, these days. A presentation tends to be an opportunity to persuade people."
As for business correspondence, Evans says, "the number one writing skill that business people need today is writing email and I think that is one area that companies need to check – that their learners are going to spend their time learning to write email, that they’re not going to waste their time."
Evans also has a word of advice for teachers. "I think it’s very important that all business English teachers are interested in business and follow it," he says. "If you’re the kind of teacher that finds business very boring, never opens the business pages of the paper, never opens a copy of The Economist, then maybe you should change your habits.
"Business is very very interesting, it’s a very dynamic, colourful environment, full of interesting personalities, fascinating events. There’s a lot for teachers to enjoy and to learn from in the business world.
Obviously companies will want teachers who are in touch with business. To ensure they get them, Evans suggests another series of questions. "Do your teachers enjoy business? Are they informed, do they keep up to date? Ask them if they keep copies of business magazines in the school. After all, it’s incredibly easy now to get hold of business magazines on the Web. There’s no excuse now for not to be looking at these magazines – Business Week, The Economist, Fortune magazine."
Altogether, not a bad consultation session. Worth every penny I would say.
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A "Powerhouse" writer 
David Evans is a prolific writer of business English texts. He is best known for his popular Powerhouse series published by Longman. As you might expect, his theme is international English. "I’ve tried in all my books really, to bear in mind a notion of international English – not to make a false distinction between British English and American English where it’s not necessary. And so when you look at the English that’s being used, I’ve tried in Powerhouse, the business English book, to draw on as wide a range of sources as possible. "So although I’m British, some of the models I use to teach from come from, say, American movies. So I’ll reprint a bit of a Hollywood movie script and look at the way a negotiation is done, say, in The Godfather, and use that as a model. To me, it’s unimportant that was written by an American scriptwriter and was acted in the movie by Marlon Brando, because the language that you can take from it is international. "Equally, if you listen to any of the tapes that go with the book, again, they were recorded in London. But obviously London is a big international city so we’ve got access to fantastic American actors, actors from all around the world – we’ve used actors from a number of different countries in putting the tapes together. Evans also makes a distinction between English for business and English for work. Almost anybody in the workplace today needs some basic knowledge of English. And that’s what I mean by English for work. It’s language for the telephone, for exchanging information, language for email and for the Web. And the language of travel – the language of travelling or of dealing with travellers." Evans covers these topics at the basic level in a second series of books called Powerbase. |
terryfrd@ksc15.th.com |