Teacher Discussion Forums

Hi All

I am currently reading for a Post Graduate Certificate in Professional Studies in Education (Applied Linguistics) by reading a distance-learning course on Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages Worldwide (TESOLW) with the Open University in England. This is a very tight and demanding course with the primary focus being on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL).

My personal primary interest is in teaching Business English (or, preferably, Business Management in English) on corporate training courses. I already have a Post Graduate Certificate in Education, having followed a 1 year teacher training programme (Greenwich University, PGCE) and have a Certificate in English Language Training for Adults (Cambridge University, CELTA), not to mention a BSc Hons in Business Computing Systems, an MA in Arts Management and numerous other professional qualifications. You can find out more about me at https://www.openbc.com/hp/Simon_HeathcoteParker/ and www.SHPconsulting.com/BusinessEnglish. I have to do this course as a direct result of being passed over for interview for a position as a university lecturer here purely because I do not have a university qualification with English as the subject (despite the fact that it was actually to teach Business Management on a Media Management degree programme).

I have to come up with a project proposal for the above mentioned course by the end of the month that centres around the ideas of 3 readers and a book on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The books are as follows:

* 'Analysing English In A Global Context' (edited by Anne Burns and Caroline Coffin),
* 'English Language Teaching In Its Social Context' (edited by Christopher N Candlin and Neil Mercer),
* 'Innovation In English Language Teaching' (edited by David R Hall and Ann Hewings), and
* 'Using Functional Grammar' (NCELTR).

I am currently based in Vienna, Austria, and currently have just 1 private student for TOEFL (US academic university entrance Test Of English as a Foreign Language) whom I will only be teaching for the next 10 days. Vienna shuts down completely over the Summer until late September so direct class observation is impossible.

Would anybody have any ideas how to go about this? The project proposal is due at the end of the month and the project itself is due by mid-September. It is not a long project, just 5,000 words, but it has to be academic and reflect the books above.

All serious help and advice would be very much appreciated. Maybe some of the teachers here would be prepared to answer some questionnaires or something? Please help.

Thank you very much in advance

Do you have any data from previously taught courses - student writings, interviews, observations, videos, tape recordings, etc.? or can you get hold of former students to do interviews about their former work? There are a lot of papers on Business English and SFL from authors in Australia. You can find them on Google Scholar. My colleague and I are working on material from a Business English course required for first year and second year transfer students in Commerce. We took samples of their assignments and developed a manual for the students to examine the samples as a basis for their future writing using Beverly Derewianka's "How Text Works" as a guide. Many of the Commerce students think that the course is designed to improve their writing but is in fact just a gate keeping course so they need to know this social practice so they won't hand in work with errors. The main social practice of the course is to encourage them to find help with all their work so the Commerce professors don't have to deal with English problems in assignments. Knowing this changes the focus of the course and is much more practical for instructors and students. What problems do you see in your teaching there?

Thank you Sally.

Sadly I do not have any data from previously taught courses. All the bits I have done to date have been 1-to-1 and tailored to student needs as we went along.

I have not heard of Google Scholar before. I'll find out about it.

As to your parting question, "What problems do you see in your teaching there?", I'm not sure I understand your question. Can you clarify this a little please?

Many thanks

The best research questions come out of frustration or worry or interest in some problem that is specific to your area. Just as literature teachers often say to write about things you know about, research is often the best when you are researching something that you know about. You must have questions from your own education, things that have bothered you, things not covered in your courses, things that the professors mention or the other teachers-in-training. Then you try and find all that has been written on that and find the areas that haven't been covered for your own research. I just gave a practical example from a course that I instruct. It would be hard to write something practical for future teachers if I didn't experience frustration with the set up of the course and then think about how to deal with that. Knowing about Social Practice gave me a focus to observe the course from the outside as well because no one was telling the students the true nature of the course and so they just took it as another English course where the instructors corrected in red pencil every mistake they could find. Each instructor (and there are corrected in their own manner, some more strictly than others. Since the marks made in the course count on their final tally, the students want to do as well as possible even though it is only a one credit course. These are the kinds of things you can discover through looking at the Social Practice of the course. The Systemic Functional Linguistics helped us looked at the meat of the course and allowed us to break down the various styles of writing they would need in the Business World - writing a memo, a company report, a resume, a covering letter, and to show them how to examine the type of writing required right down to the types of verbs that are most powerful for this situation and so on. Bernie Mohan has done some good research in this area from the University of British Columbia and you might want to look him up on Google Scholar. You just go to Google.com and there is a list at the top that includes Images, and Scholar. You can use these papers to help you figure out how to write your own if you examine the way that they are set up and the kinds of language they use in each section.

Very useful information, Sally. Thank you.

The TOEFL course seems a godd starting place with regards to the research. I thought maybe I could even compare it against the BEC for relevance as a tool for assessing student ability prior to application for a place at a university Business School but the 'language school' that I am working at presently has absolutely nothing relevant to that.

Do you have any findings you can email me?

Sorry, we are just writing up the paper and won't be finished until September. Bernie has written quite a few papers with former students though and those with Tammy Slater might be interesting to you. I don't know if they are available on Google but will try them. I think comparing your courses would be an excellent research topic. It would be very useful for people on these threads to know what each covered and how and if you found the material relevant.

Thanks Sally