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Teaching Business English For the First Time? Teach Your Learners Like A Pro With These Effective Suggestions

You might be thinking business English is just the same thing as teaching English as a foreign language (if you are a fresher though)!

Well, this often comes from the perception that teaching business English is similar to teaching business studies or ESL teaching with an online TEFL certificate course. Considering the importance of the lessons and the nature of the content, teaching business English is not a joke. It is a responsibility. Also, business English is one of the most competitive areas in the EFL/ESL world at this time.

The reason behind this huge demand and competition is the reason that business professionals are looking for effective teachers to help them achieve their linguistic areas. Teaching business English is a focused method of teaching that mainly emphasizes on business terminology and related topics with corporate culture.

Here are some helpful tips to get your business English teaching off to a good start:

1. Focus On Precise Areas

It’s always more advantageous to modify the lessons to learners’ detailed needs. Well, try to focus on Telephone Conversational approaches through your lesson activities or role-plays. Just make sure that all of your activities are as appropriate to their real job as possible. Along with Telephone Communication, focus on Email writing too. Let your learners be able to email in a professional way. Try to incorporate expressions that they will come across in emailing and get them to practice regularly. These are very important in their everyday jobs. Throughout delivering the lessons, keep a note with you about different areas which your students may need a bit of work on.

2. Needs Analysis

While teaching business English, it is very important to find the purpose of your students’ learning. These purposes can be anything like writing emails, telephone communication, conducting meetings or making presentations, etc. Also, try to find out if there are any company-specific reasons for learning English. This will break the ice and get your students talking. Eventually, you will learn what your students are hoping to attain from the course. Make sure you know their work experience as well as their learning experience. By doing these analysis, you can customize your lessons well.

3. Combine Grammar with Business Topics

Remember, your students have to be able to make comprehensible English sentences. You can boost their learning by combining Business English with grammar. Business English sentences will get richer by adding some grammatical elements. Maybe you can teach them like combine adverbs of regularity with a prospect, for example – you can tell them this sentence “we sometimes offer concessions”. Mix it in with something they like.

4. Include Real-life Situations

Well, you need to remember your addressees! Therefore, make sure to include activities that they feel comfortable doing as they are not children. Sometimes, you may come across a few students who might hold powerful positions. We are again recommending different kinds of role plays as these are a great option for your TEFL business students. Ensure your activities have a clear persistence. The significant factor is to recollect your target audience and to behave professionally at all times.

5. Select Your Resources Sensibly

Undoubtedly the most important resource is the learners themselves. Here, you need to concentrate on your goals and needs. Your students will deliver you with real materials from their working lives like leaflets, emails, PowerPoint presentations or reports, etc. In these situations, your learners usually expect you to take some of these resources and make your own worksheets from them.

6. Understand Your Learners’ Lifestyle

Well, most of the time the business English students are possibly attending class just before or after work. Sometimes, your apprentices’ busy lives may prompt them to cancel or change their class times due to work-related problems. Therefore, you need to be understanding enough and flexible.

7. Practice Job Interview Sessions

Here you can also have your students interview each other. Interview your students and ask about their job skills or other qualifications. You can set them in pairs to do this activity at the same time. Even if you’re teaching business English online, you can pair them up and ask them to interview each other in front of the other students. A great way to get business English students to practice in interview sessions.

8. Incorporate the Presentations

A business person needs to be able to deliver presentations excellently. Therefore, as a business English teacher, you need to teach them well. Include different terminology related to reading graphs, charts, etc. Then, you can just hand out actual chart samples and have students practice presenting them to the class or, they can create their own! Well, if you’re teaching business English online then email the samples prior to the time, so that your students can review them before class.

Well, apart from the above-mentioned suggestions, you can consider these following tips to teach business English:
 

• Be flexible and try to understand glitches
• Be professional as much as you can
• Try to focus on high regularity vocabulary for business
• Maximize student speaking time
• Teach purposeful language phrases
• Be motivational and creative
• Use more professional terminology

Do you need special training or certification to teach business English?

Well, most of your employers will require the internationally accredited TEFL/TESOL certification. The certification aids your prospects of getting more viable and higher-paying jobs with targeted skills in teaching business English. However, if you are a teacher without a degree or background in business, a more in-depth specialization course program would be recommended.

Even if you understand business well, you need to be trained on how to deliver English language instruction appropriately. Thus, most employers, especially in the business world, will need you to have a TEFL/TESOL certificate even if you have a business background or degree.

Well, business English teaching can be very interesting and rewarding at the same time. The online TEFL certificate course prepares individuals to teach business English successfully. These are just a few instructions as well as techniques for teaching English for work to low-level learners. Try these suggestions for your business English teaching classes and you will be able to see a significant improvement in results.

Have Fun While Teaching Business English!