| Talking Business in Class |
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Talking Business in Class by Chris Sion Delta Publishing 2004 ISBN 1-900783-64-9 Revew Published in ETp 36 January 2005 Chris Sion starts from the assumption that a business English 'client' (or might I mean student?) is first and foremost a human being, not merely a technician of management. Chris clearly respects the high intelligence he has found among business students and his book is full of exercises that respect this brightness. So, for example, on Page 52 you will find the suggestion that vocabulary should be organised in students' notebooks in the way shown below: To invite you and your students to think 'outside the box', Chris suggests these other categories: > Very important > Theoretical > Just what I need > Interesting but useless In a quiet, gentle way Talking Business in Class offers you some startling ideas to try with your students. On page 62, in an exercise headed And Now for Something Completely Different, Chris writes: 'Tell the class you're tired of following the same basic pattern in your lessons. You want to try something new. In the next lesson, each student should come prepared, for example, to do the following three things: report on a minor newspaper item, ask a question and tell a joke.' Here he is suggesting that we take the students into our confidence and share lesson preparation with them - not a bad idea, eh? If you turn to the section on Presentations, towards the end of the book, you will see whole-person thinking applied to this important business skill. Chris offers a checklist for effective presentations, focusing on the following: > Structure > Time and timing > Audio-visual aids, eg PowerPoint > Use of voice > Content and comprehensibility > Body language and rapport with the listeners > How question time is managed > Accuracy of language In teaching presentations, Chris reasonably assumes that he is teaching communication and not just the details of the target language, so linguistic correctness comes bottom of the list. The opening section of the book, Mini-Activities, provides a flood of topics to get short discussion going in business groups, for example: > What was the first job you ever did? > If you could change three things about your job > Talk about your first day at work. > The least reliable business contact you've ever had. > Which person would you most like to model yourself on professionally? > The worst communicator you've ever come across. > Discuss the organisational culture of the company you work for. > Talk about a mistake you made at work. I write this review with a heavy heart as my friend and with-traveller, Chris Sion died earlier this year and so this is his last book. I have known him since the days in the late 70s and 80s when he worked at Pilgrims. Indeed he carried off a Pilgrims student to be his wife and mother of their two children! A mild, mature, philosophy-tuned voice has gone from the EFL symphony, and I mourn its passing. Chris is one of many people who shaped Pilgrims into what it is today, a leading source of EFL classroom ideas. His was the idea of resource books that arose from the whole staffroom, not just from a few hands. He pioneered this very successful sub-genre with Recipes for Tired Teachers (a wickedly good title that panders to the worst in us teachers!) and More Recipes for Tired Teachers (or was it Recipes for More Tired Teachers?!). The success of these two titles genuinely surprised the publishers, Addison Wesley, and I remember that at Spanish TESOL, 1986, Recipes for Tired Teachers was stolen from my Pilgrims table six times, while my own Grammar Games was only stolen three times! I felt gutted! Chris was a careful, slow, meticulous editor and a kind, generous friend and it is with tears pricking that I recognise that I will never touch him again, nor hear his voice, nor see him. |
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