US vs. UK business English

[Jamie (K)]

You're right. Made redundant is laid off in American English, and redundancies are layoffs. And if you're an Italian-speaking American child whose father has been laid off, you may say "? stato ledofato". (I have actually heard that!)

It's not only in France that it's hard to find business ESL books in American English. There are also almost none of them in the US! I have no idea why. I have asked the reps from textbook companies, and they have told me that British English is most in demand around the world for business ESL "especially in Asia", but I don't believe it. (The most candid rep told me that people have been complaining for years about the lack of American business ESL titles, but that the publisher never does anything about it. She encouraged me to complain again, and often.) I think it's got something to do with the largest ESL publishers on the US market actually being British. I have sometimes wondered if they get government subsidies in the UK for producing those books but not in the US. I simply don't know the answer.

I do know the results, though. When I teach a business ESL course, the best book I can use will be British, and I will have to keep interrupting the lessons to say, "But we don't say that in North America. We really say..." Since the British term is the one in the book, the students learn that one and are liable to forget the one I told them about.

Another result is that corporate managers who arrive in the US can be somewhat lost when they get to their posts here. I am frequently sent to teach these guys -- some of them are at the CEO and CFO level. They can speak English, and have large business and technical vocabularies, but they are completely lost in meetings, because they don't know any baseball idioms, any cowboy idioms, or any terms from American football, among others.

I don't think that most large American companies have any language policy at all. They just somehow expect people to learn English through the school system or on their own, and they don't do much about helping them. Watch one of these companies manage a translation project, and you'll see that they have no clue about anything involving language. I also don't think many large companies have much to do with ETS, if anything. ETS may approach a few to consult them, but my guess is that ETS works on its own, and with some help from business departments at universities.

I think that in some cases the textbook company representatives may be right, and that there might not be much demand even in the US for business ESL books. I notice that the typical university's English Language Institute simply teaches foreign students the English necessary for the TOEFL, and then the students can pick up the business English in their regular business classes. Also, very few ESL instructors here know much business terminology. Those of us who can teach students to explain an economic chart in natural English are rather rare.

[toeic]

Good afternoon Jamie, I think there are two issues we are talking about here: Firstly, the lack of business English books that used American business terms and secondly the fact that most companies don't have language learning policy in place.
I agree with you, it seems that there is little connection if any between ETS and the management of large corporations. It might be true that the TOEIC is used by many companies. The question is what exactly do company managers know about the TOEIC? You are right, most companies assume that their recruits have acquired some English language skills through the state run school system. In most European countries English is a mandatory school subject but surveys show that only a small percentage of the graduates are able to communicate in English on a very basic level let alone in a business context. So the conclusion can be drawn that the state school system is ineffective and companies should introduce systems that bridge that education gap.
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[Jamie (K)]

[toeic]

[Conchita]

[Jamie (K)]

Most of the German managers who arrive here in Detroit have grammar at the low intermediate to intermediate level. Their understanding of idioms and phrasal verbs is almost nil, but they have large word vocabularies related their professional fields and hobbies.

In contrast are the German student interns at the same companies. Most of them have been exchange students or traveled a lot, and many of them read English novels all the time. These interns speak English that sounds incredibly fluent on the chit-chat level, but if you go much deeper than that, they stumble. Most of them are eager to learn, but a few get exasperated in the lessons because they've been told for so long, by so many people, that their English is "perfect".

I don't know much about the language schools you mention. The only one I know is Berlitz. The instructors there are not well paid and are not usually language experts, so students who have been to Berlitz often complain that they can't get their questions answered. However, their method has been tried and tested for decades, and their materials are very professionally done. This is in great contrast with the materials students have shown me from other expensive language schools, which are full of typos and other mistakes. I don't know which school is which, though.

In Michigan, corporate language instruction is handled by various private companies and by departments of two or three universities, which usually have names like "Department of Language and Cultural Training". Some very successful language instruction companies are run by individuals out of their homes. There are few or no onsite classes, and these companies are basically language brokers that vet instructors and then send them to the client's home or workplace. Classes are very rare, and almost all of the instruction is one-on-one. In rare cases I'll get two students together. The expense is usually handled by the client's company. The aggressive companies that provide language instruction tend to balk at paying their teachers more than $15 an hour, so they generally provide less experienced, less educated, less reliable teachers, although they may not pass the savings from this low wage on to the customer. The university departments and a lot of the people working from home pay more, so they tend to send better teachers.

[Jamie (K)]

[toeic]

[Jamie (K)]

[toeic]

Hello Jamie, I have been thinking about our conversation regarding the business English text situation and I'd like to ask you how you define business English? All the textbooks I have seen so far seem to contain a randomly compiled number of topics that somehow might be related to general business situations but I have found the language to be very artificial. It's obvious that those books are made primarily by language experts rather than businees executives. So how would you describe that thing that we often call "business English"? Does it exist at all?

Regards
Fabrice
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[Jamie (K)]

I haven't seen any books that do a good, thorough job of teaching business English, and I agree that most of them seem to have been written by language experts with minimal input from business people. There are some that are really good but too British for me (but probably not for you), and those good ones come mainly from Heinle. They are for more advanced students, and deal very directly with various fundamentals of management and financial English. In contrast, I used a lesson from a Cambridge book once that spent too much of the chapter on the stock market dealing with socially responsible investing. You got the impression that the authors were ex-hippies who didn't know much about the stock market, and so they made the chapter about their concerns from the 1960s.

The format I find the most useless, at least for the students I get, is that one where they start out with the language of job applications, and then move on to various stages of cutting a deal. It's all made up by the language teachers, so it's all artificial.

The problem with teaching business English is that there are so many aspects to what students need when they enter the English-speaking workplace.

They need the professional jargon of their field (along with other fields), and I find that European business graduates are very well educated in this. They can have low-intermediate grammar, but be absolutely expert at their professional vocabulary.

Just the professional jargon won't do the trick, though, and students who know "business English" only in that sense are quite crippled in the workplace. They complain mainly that they can't understand what goes on in meetings. So, do you work with them in a book on "the language of meetings"? That might help, but they still won't understand that much more. It turns out that what they are really missing is ordinary colloquial idioms, phrasal verbs and simple, common language. When I get these people, I work with them from a good idiom book, and then I read articles with them that are in everyday office language. Some of the best for this purpose are Jared Sandberg's Cubicle Culture column in the Wall Street Journal. Forbes and Business Week can also be written very colloquially, and they're good resources too. I also work on very basic skills with them, such as verbally discussing charts, so that they can say more than, "It went up to..." and, "It went down to..."

I think that for students to learn good business English, they first have to learn good English in the normal way. After that, it's a straddle that combines ordinary, very informal colloquial expressions with high-level professional language.

One of the things that's wrong with typical business English books is that they seem to labor under the fantasy that people will be speaking uppity, high-class English all the time, which, at least in my country, is very far from reality.