This episode is available on the TEFLology website HERE.
It can also be listened to on the tweet embedded below:
Listen to our latest interview with Chia Suan Chong @chiasuan and Mike Hogan @irishmikeh right here https://t.co/QyA3tZvsNq via @acast— TEFLology Podcast (@TEFLology) August 2, 2017
I have, once again, managed to fall behind in my reviewing.
This episode was over a month ago, and since then TEFLology has uploaded 2 new episodes onto their website. So I'm 3 episodes behind at the moment. But hopefully I'll catch up soon.
This is another excellent interview episode. (TEFLology has yet to do a bad interview episode). Chia Suan Chong and Mike Hogan are both charismatic speakers, so the conversation is interesting, and easy to listen to.
There were some interesting insights into the nature of Business English as well.
Like the TEFLology interviewer, in the past I've been assigned to teach Business English courses, and I felt like I've taught the whole course without having a clear idea of what I was doing.
I'm not even entirely sure what the difference is between Business English classes and General English classes, except that my best guess was that in Business English classes I focus more on business vocabulary.
Interesting, then, to hear Chia Suan Chong assert that Business English is NOT about teaching jargon.
She says that the clients know the business jargon better than you do, so there's no point in teaching it to them. And I have to admit that in my own experience, this has often been true.
She and Mike Hogan talk in general terms about what Business English is in a positive sense, although I felt like it was all a bit general, and I didn't get much out of it in concrete terms. (i.e. if I had to teach a Business English class tomorrow, I still wouldn't know how to plan it.)
I'm wondering though... having just finished reading Implementing the Lexical Approach, perhaps Business English would be best taught by teaching useful phrases related to business situations--not business jargon (like the names of stocks, or something), but useful phrases for communicating in a meeting, or writing an email.
I suspect that was what Chia Suan Chong was alluding to, when she talked about how Business English should be about improving the students' communicative power.
Other Notes:
* As much as I love to complain about the assigned textbooks in my classes, I'm also reluctant to skip any materials. I've got a completist personality, and if I skip over a lesson, I always feel like my students are missing out on something. So, as a consequence, I have the bad habit of trying to do all the lessons in my assigned textbook, even if I know they are not useful for my learners.
Interesting, then, to hear Mike Hogan talk about his experience textbook writing, and say that textbook writers are fully aware that not all the lessons in the book will be appropriate for all learners, and so they try to include enough material that teachers can pick and choose what is appropriate for their learners.
It's somewhat of a bitter pill to swallow for someone like me, who likes the feeling of completeness I get when my students complete all the lessons in a unit. But it does appear to be the way the textbooks are designed to be used.
....although, I've been chatting about this with other teachers in my staff room, and a lot of teachers are under the impression that they are supposed to cover everything in the textbook. (i.e., it's not just me who was confused about.) It seems that the textbook industry has done a very poor job of communicating to teachers about how the textbooks are actually supposed to be used.
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