Job Discussion Forums

[Flicka]

As per the title! Am about to embark on a fairly intensive one to one tuition course with an Italian business man who wants to study business English as well as a load of grammar. I've not done much in the way of one-to-one before so just after any tips the more experienced among you might have!

It will be 12 hours a week (on top of my regular schedule which is currently at around 26 hours a week). Two two hour sessions during the week and two 3 hour sessions at weekends. I've never taught a 3 hour session before!! Eeek!

Look forward to hearing your suggestions and recommendations and tips and everything else you can say to me!

Cheers,
Lizzie.

[naturegirl321]

Alex Case has some good info at TEFL.net

[mozzar]

I do not envy you!

Try to draw from a lot of different coursebooks, youtube videos and readings. I'd also suggest taking a five/ten minute break in the middle if the three hours - you'll both need it.

[rafaella]

You could get him to prepare and give a short presentation on his company or department. A similar but more informal option would be to ask him to explain the products/services that his company provides. These activities have the advantage of being relevant to him but don't require too much prep. What you will need to do is give him ideas about how he can improve his presentation skills and help him out with vocabulary. The other advantage of this type of class is that it can highlight gaps in a student's grammar and that can generate ideas for other classes.

Depending on his level, you could make use of industry-related material such as a trade journal. You could create a worksheet based on an article or simply read and discuss a topic.

Does he need to work on his writing? If so, and if he is sufficiently motivated, you could give him emails to write in his own time (to address specific queries or problems from customers) and then go through them together in class.

If there are no confidentiality issues, get him to tell you about situations where he has had to use English at work. You might be able to role play typical situations with him to improve his fluency and confidence.

In a long one-to-one class, you need to have variety and a change of pace otherwise it can get too much for both of you.

[darkcity]

This may or may not sound obvious, but when I was teaching one-on-one and working on conversation, often I would type as the student was talking. It sounds distracting but it's actually not if you select the right moment to write down what he is saying and type fairly fast.

This way, the two of you can go over his mistakes together.

The other posts about making him prepare a presentation or something is a pretty good idea as well.

[riverboat]

I second darkcity's suggestion about noting down his errors for correction at the end of the exercise/lesson, particularly during fluency activities. I work mainly with business people on a one-to-one and nearly all of them appreciate this. You can also note down examples of good practice, so that they don't always associate you writing something down with them making a mistake.

I'd also keep noting down new vocabulary that he's learning, and keep constantly going over and revising and consolidating this in each lesson. You can use different activities for vocab review (e.g. an "articulate" style game, pictionary games, picture flashcards, sentence gapfills etc). Give him little interim tests to see how much he's retaining.

It sounds like you're going to be doing a LOT of hours with him (how many weeks is this for?) So the key will be to have lots of mixed focuses - I'd use newspaper articles for discussion and vocabulary building, listening activities (could be podcasts, films, TV, coursebook listening, whatever), and lots of different types of business fluency. Some ideas:

- Presentations (about different topics and for different contexts. E.g., a presentation about his job and what it involves to a group of high school kids at a careers evening, a presentation about his company's rivals and what they should do to beat them to his board of directors, a presentation summing up his year's activities at work to his boss to support his case for a pay rise etc)
- Meetings: it's hard to rehearse this in a one to one, but it is possible. Get lots of typical meetings phrases (for agreeing, disagreeing, interrupting, clarifying, chairing etc) put them on cards, and have a discussion /debate about something the two of you. Make him get rid of all his cards by appropriately using the phrases on them during the course of the discussion
- Negotiating: if relevant to his job. You can find lots of negotiating roleplays on internet ESL sites - you'll have to do them with him of course
- Writing: emails, reports, letters, memos, newsletter articles
- Telephone English: lots of roleplays between the two of you for different business-y situations
- Business Travel: all the usual hotel/restaurant English
- Dealing with visitors / being a visitor: presenting yourself at a company reception / making small talk with your guest/host, welcoming a visitor, showing a visitor around your office / being shown around etc

And I'd consider breaking it down into thematic chunks as well, e.g: Marketing, Finance, HR, Cultures, Ethics, Travel, Customers, Negotiating etc.

You don't say what level he is, which would help to suggest a book. For business classes I quite like the Market Leader series, particularly the Intermediate book. It has a mixture of all of the above themes and contexts, and includes a CD with listening tracks. It's designed for a bigger class, but it's easy to adapt to individual students. THere's lots of good discussion material in there at the start of each chapter.

Good luck: I hope he's a talker because if not your 12 hours per week could be pretty painful! But 2 hour blocks can go pretty quickly as long as he's relatively motivated and not entirely dependant on you to provide all the energy and drive in your sessions.

[Flicka]

Thank you all for some very useful replies!
Still waiting for the confirmation that these lessons are going to start...Im in the enviable position of having to prepare something "just in case".... gonna be great to spend my weekend working on this and then it doesnt happen.... wow I really love EF....

[gaijinalways]

Knowing the level would be very helpful, as well as knowing the purposes for which he intends to use language that he gains during this intensive period.

I currently teach a one to one for 4 hours a day, 3x a week (4x this week). I cover listening and vocabulary/grammar exercises in Business ventures 2, supplemental cultural information from a variety of sources, presentation skills (he'll finally be doing a complete one with PowerPoint slides we reviewed this Thursday), general information about San Diego (the place that he is being transferred to), and general conversational/current event topics. I take 2-3 breaks during that time of 10 minutes each usually.

I'm fortunate in that my student is low to mid intermediate level. He doesn't have a lot of interests, and his discussion skills are weak for longer discussions, but he is able to express shorter opinions with some support, agree, disagree, etc.. (typically for many Asian students, this is a weak area, supporting arguments/opinions).

The more material you can try to use related to the student's interests helps as well. Some activities will use more time and that is fine. Pacing is important, don't over-drill your student, keep it light but firm.

As to noting errors, personally I don't feel a need to type them out. If your student is making that many basic errors, just pointing them out is not going to fix that problem in such a short space of time. I would take notes depending on the activity that you're doing, and certainly recycling vocabulary and phrases (lexical chunks so to speak) is always useful.

[Glenski]

As for me, I wouldn't be able to offer much advice without knowing some additional information.

What is his level?
Does he want "business English" for some specific purpose?
What are his weak points? (By that, I mean 2 things. The first is reading, writing, speaking, listening, presenting, negotiating, vocabulary. The second is more fundamental and basically directed towards his grammar; that is, is he weak in prepositions, transitional conjunctions, SV agreement, etc.?)

Long classes like that (one on one, to boot) will tire both of you. To avoid your own fatigue, definitely schedule more than one break in 3 hours. To use the time (not kill time), play some video clips for specific purposes. It gives you a break from talking, gives him something real to work on, and gives him listening practice.

[gaijinalways]

Videos are nice, one of my pet activities. I showed a video on presentation errors, and also we watched part of 'Supersize me' when we were talking about dangers of fast food (my student will be in the US alone for a year or more until his wife leaves her job).

Weak points are of course important, and some of these will become obvious as you work together.