Job Discussion Forums

[Stephen Jones]

Ouch! But the question is when will either be hit by enlightening?

The students of course all get their wallets lightened!

[fraup]

I'd like to say that, like any franchise, individual Berlitz schools can be either fairly well-run enterprises or out to gouge students and teachers alike. I never heard of teachers having to obtain a business license, although I do know that it's cheaper to hire "independent contractors" and pay them a flat fee without deducting for taxes, insurance etc. The contractor is supposed to be responsible for those items. It may be that in certain countries, the law may require such "independent contractors" to have a business license. (In the U.S. you just use your Social Security number to report such earnings.)

I know that Berlitz salaries are low. Still, if you're going to hire untrained warm native-speaker bodies, it is a good idea to give them some guidance in the form of teacher manuals, and I've heard about many schools who don't bother to do that. An experienced, trained ESL teacher wouldn't need to check out Berlitz.

[gaijinalways]

[soapdodger]

Gaijinalways...not that I mind whether you take me "as seriously" or not, try and follow the logic of this: (a) international trade has gone on for hundreds, nay, thousands of years without any need for some EFL-concocted codswallop like "business English" (b) what any business person needs is a sound grounding in general English and a good dictionary of specialist terms related to their own field (c) considering the generally awful level of education of the average EFL teacher and their inability to grasp the fundamentals of the language, is it likely to expect them to teach people who have already undergone specific training to reach their position something about their profession or industry they don't already know? (d) Do you think any school is going to tell their clients this?

[John Hall]

Soapdodger is probably just trolling, but...

My students want to work at multinational companies in Costa Rica, where English is used anywhere from between 10% to 100% of the time, depending on the company. Those in the 100% category include, but are not limited to, many Call Centers and sportsbooks. (Hewlett-Packard actually prohibits Spanish from being spoken at work!)

Take a typical General English lesson:

"Okay, students, today we are going to learn how to discuss and give opinions about movies that we've seen..."

Totally useless!

Or how about: "Okay, today we are going to study the past unreal conditional. You need this in order to be able to express regrets about past experiences to your boss."

Also, I find it entirely credulous that my students who need to learn how to negotiate effectively in English only need

[fraup]

The divergence into Business English is probably off-topic, as I don't know whether Berlitz has developed a separate "Business English" course. When I worked for them, eons ago, they were targeting businesses and having success because of their approach. In the 90s, I knew a Polish woman who became a successful manager of a Berlitz school in Warsaw, having started out as an underpaid teacher of Polish to Americans. Somewhere along the line, the company had turned her into a polished sales professional, and given her as much marketing savvy as an M.B.A.
I'd say that if a teacher is interested in ESL administration, he/she could probably do worse than use Berlitz as a stepping stone.

[gaijinalways]

A lot of the Berlitz content is directed toward business usage. We also have books specifically for children, teenagers, university students and retirees (the last two are new texts, I haven't seen or taught them yet).

The range of topics for business English is different, and if you think differently you are in a minority Soapdodger. I do agree with you that students need general English as well, and that is liberally mixed in with the business terms most business people need (depending on the type of company, department worked in, position held, etc.). Also as alluded to, business people need business skills; i.e. negotiating, responding to complaints, etc, which are similar to language functions we use in every day life, but slighly different (terminology, formality, etc.).

Kinds of terms we go over and attmept to get students to learn and use;

accounting; income statement, balance sheet, income, revenue, profit, net, taxes, etc.

marketing; promotion, web, telemarketing, adsense, foot traffic, publicity stunts, advertising, target audience, media, medium, etc.


management; promotion, transfer, suspend, performance review, oversee, supervise, project, budget, subordinate, superior, executive, etc.

sales; revenue, total sales, gross margin, inventory, loss leader, etc.

Obviously, depending on the level of the student, the amount of usable vocabulary will vary.

[Phil_K]

The worst thing about Berlitz, and in Mexico, Harmon Hell , Interlingua and Quit Learning, is that most teachers know they are ****, but the power of advertising convinces companies that those are the places to go... which makes it difficult for people like me, trying to establish my own company.

Now, if I overcharge the students, underpay the teachers and use a dated system, I could retire

[spiral78]

Oh, sigh. The method's largely been discredited by the past 20 years of research in the field, but corporations continue to sign contracts with Berlitz because the name is safe (Berlitz aren't going to fold halfway through a contract) and national governments recognize the Berlitz name and therefore give the corporations whatever tax breaks they are due for providing language ed. for their staff.

That's a LEGITIMATE reason for them to continue to exist, quite honestly. Simply because they are a successful business. NOT because they have any real handle on how languages are learned.

[soapdodger]

Yes, of course there is a kind of "English" that applies to business...it goes something like this:


Thank you for attending this initial discussion on the first cut of the Future Manoeuvre Nutrition Composition Paper. To avoid the chicken and egg scenario we should talk turkey here and perhaps get early visibility of the proposed generic framework so that we can get our ducks in a row. There is clearly room for a meeting of minds for a corporate approach to the overarching requirement of the main gate business case, as outlined on the pie chart, to give us the equities in this issue. We are all over the map on this one, so I am minded to give you a tasker. I want you to think out of the box and articulate a blue-skies vision which we can take forward as a think-piece in order to vector in on societal global paradigms. I know you are not sighted on this issue but we really need to leverage some coherence across the piece and engage with our pan-customer community to enable them to deliver some tangible and holistic outputs for this nutrition challenge against bestclass peers.

No names, no pack drill, but if the chips are down we can fight this one up the chain of command with a view to achieving interoperability and a commonality of standards. The big cheese may be a sandwich short of a picnic, but I don't want a bun fight if the badgers come into the cake shop, so let's pick the low hanging fruit and be prepared to move up country with this one - tamasha or no tamasha. We all know which way the cookie crumbles. However, before jumping into bed with the idea, we must push the envelope out as far as possible with a view to joining the party before they come over the hill in some numbers. I refer to that self-licking lollipop, "Disaggregation : A Case to Answer"; it's fast becoming a dog's breakfast. At this range I see a potential own goal on our hands and before we're completely blown out of the water we should be prepared to go around the buoy again. A wholly synergistic approach is needed; after all, a results driven mindset might have us on a slippery slope if we go off-piste. We should probably take this to a win-win situation and get the ticks in the boxes. At the end of the day, no one should be out of the loop and we should fast track a value-added bottom line. Our core business must remain with the movers and shakers and, if we hit the right buttons, we can flick their switch.

It is clear that we're not dealing with a level playing field and the main effort must be to cross the start line with the pot of gold firmly in our grasp before someone moves the goal-posts. The knock on effect of touching base with lessons learnt from the big picture is to go the extra mile and play hardball.

There may be too much smoke and mirrors, so I suggest we park the first idea, go firm where we are on the second and surge with the third using some pretty fast footwork if we are to meet the aggressive timelines otherwise there will be nothing on the clock but the maker's name. And no standing on the touchline just because it's a sticky wicket. Thinking on the hoof, I am in the picture with the more bangs for the buck argument, but we must inform the debate in the grand scheme of things.

Run the idea up the flagpole and let's see who salutes it -my ears tell me that we're all reading from the same sheet of music here. Fast-forwarding slightly, I have lodged a fiver with the grown-ups, which means we'll need a cradle to grave solution on the back burner otherwise we'll run out of steam and end up throwing the baby out with the bath water and have to rely on the stove-piped legacy. As to the first idea, you will need to dine � la carte to capture the underpinning metrics, and also consider the force drivers so that this workstream informs our baseline position and facilitates some boiler-plated headline goals for the future. Naturally, by teasing out the air gaps you will produce the delta and square the circle.

I hear what you say but this is not a zero sum game and the actuality will need to be harmonized in order to ensure buy-in and the overall bespoke architecture. There is a basket of workstrands which will inform your chapeau-piece in the round and you must ramp these up, or down, as necessary - and don't forget to prioritise the parameters. Fly kites if you must but we really need to test all sub-concepts to destruction, holding our stakeholders' feet to the fire, while remaining alert to the mood music. As this must be a joined-up wake-up call, the taxonomy of our change management needs to be taken forward in a timely manner. We will therefore need to cut to the chase with this project to keep empowered.

I judge that an enhanced strawman might be handy, which could chime with the hooks exposed during our recent workshop. By all means optimize the overall granularity of the piece by drilling down and mapping across to other position papers, but cross-walk or flag-up any emerging arenas so that you continue to engage with our development agenda. I believe it is time to take ownership and display intellectual rigour by clearly articulating a road map which will, of course, require milestones and signposts to give a coherent direction of travel. I aim to close the loop with a sensitivity analysis. The first cut must reflect a seamless step-change by incentivising sub-optimal solutions for those going off-line. To avoid mission creep, an enduring and robust construct is required.

You may therefore need to weave in and populate a new value set. Close with the deliverables before the bar gets raised - but no quick 'n' dirty solutioneering or excursions: this would be counter- intuitive, when what is needed are enablers with the embedded fidelity to fill any lacuna.

Let me know when you are good to go with a tightly-nested capping paper, we need to get our dog into the fight asap. If you need to engage with me I'll be getting traction on my maritime platform for the next 24/7 and no throwing the toys out of the cot just because it's Friday afternoon or you'll be swimming with the sharks.

The sense of fulfillment on getting your students to talk like this must be enormous........

[TheLongWayHome]

[gaijinalways]

Soapdodger,

You've just convinced me you don't know much about business if you think that is how businessmen sound. You sound more like a lawyer!

Most businesspeople don't use near the amount of idiomatic language you're using, especially in sequential sentences. Why don't you admit it, you haven't taught business English, have you?

[soapdodger]

Tssk, tssk, Gaijinalways, getting personal,again. With your intuition, if I was a sadist I'd suggest you take all your savings and have a day out at the bookies. My intuition is probably as bad as yours..I don't know what "gaijin" means, but I've arrived at a strong possibility which is almost undoubtedly wrong.

[TheLongWayHome]

[fraup]

Much as I disagreed earlier with soap's comments, I have to thank him for his hilarious attempt at "bizspeak"...amazing mix of outdated Yankee jargon and odd-sounding other stuff (Brit? S.African? Pidgin?). But for a true grasp of how we talk, you have to read Dilbert.