4 Mistakes I Made as a New Business English Teacher

My first ever class was a complete disaster. I was partly at fault, but I also blame my school for giving me a Business English class I had no business teaching.

The class was at a global technology company in Germany. There were two students, and both were consultants. It was their job to collect information on the needs of clients and relay that information to software developers. I knew nothing about their company or industry. I was also new to Germany and didn’t fully understand the business culture there.

I suppose the Direktorin of my school thought I could handle the class because I was working with the standard General English school materials. It was the same General English course books that were given to all students, regardless of their industry or aims — the same materials I had been introduced to in my 1-week training prior to starting.

One of the consultants stopped attending after the first lesson, and the other stuck around for a couple lessons after that. I learned a couple important lessons from that experience. First, Business English students don’t want to have their time wasted. They are taking time out of their busy schedules for training that should make it easier to do their job. Second, if I want to be able to give these students what they need, I need to put in the effort to prepare myself.

My story has a happy ending. By the time I left Germany, I was no longer taking classes from that school. I had established myself well enough in the region that I was selling and delivering my own courses to large companies and earning well. In order to achieve my success, I had to find a formula that worked. While I still don’t feel that I have perfected my approach, I had fixed some of the basic mistakes that plague new Business English teachers.

Here are the mistakes that I made. I am sharing them with you now so you can avoid them yourselves.

#1 using the wrong materials

What the heck was my school thinking when they sold a General English course book to these students?!

I’m sure it wasn’t the first time they pulled this stunt, and I know for certain it wasn’t the last time. They tried the same thing again with me at another company. This time it was an engineering company. They designed machines that cleaned and refilled beer bottles (an essential business in Germany, as you might imagine). I recognized the same disappointed looks on the students’ faces as soon as they saw what they were given. I needed to make it up to them somehow.

What did I do? I grabbed English versions of all the company brochures when I left that first day and began to design lessons with their own literature. I created reading comprehension tasks, and I combed through the texts looking for vocabulary and grammar that I thought would be beneficial. The appreciation was real, and I ended up getting invited to some company barbecues as a result.

This became my go to approach for most clients after that. If you are working with an international company that requires employees to speak English, there is no doubt materials somewhere that are in English. Nowadays, with everything online, the best place to start is the website. Use company descriptions, product or service descriptions, team profiles, blogs and press releases. If these materials aren’t available in English, try a competitor’s website.

Of course, there are also Business English course books. The topics of these books can range from general business topics to topics that are specific to an industry. They can also focus on specific competencies, such as email writing or presentations. These materials can and should be supplemented with company materials. In fact, try integrating some actual emails that your students have received or need to send. Compare the language from the book with the language in the real emails so students see the real world application.

#2 knowing nothing about business

I studied Journalism as my undergrad. My roommates studied business, but I never really understood what that meant (I’m not sure they did either). Teaching Business English was probably better than attending a university class on Business. I learned so much from my students about their jobs. My students taught me about what they did, and it was my job to provide them with the language to do so. Sometimes this was difficult because what they needed was highly specialized. Other language was more general, relevant to all industries.

In order to brush up on my business speak, I started buying newspapers and magazines and devouring the business sections. The Economist was my go to for a while, as well as the international version of the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune. This not only expanded my vocabulary, but also kept me up-to-date on issues that were affecting the business world and the industries my students worked in. If an article was particularly relevant, I could even include it in a lesson.

In short, if you have no business experience, then you need to do your homework if you want to be credible.

#3 failing to provide structure

When I started designing my own courses, after I left the school, I found myself frantically searching for lesson ideas the day before, and sometimes the day of the lesson. If I was lucky, I would find an article from a magazine or newspaper or I would pull up a relevant press release from their company website. However, these articles did not build in any meaningful way with a logical scope and sequence of topics and language. The language from each lesson rarely got recycled in future lessons. There was no structure or coherence.

Eventually, I learned the value of a syllabus. The syllabus forced me to consider all the topics for a course in advance. I was able to arrange topics in a way that built on each other, from easy to difficult or from broad to specific. The students also appreciated this since they knew in advance what the topics were going to be. It made the whole process seem intentional and not ad hoc.

Of course, just because you have a syllabus doesn’t mean your course is organized. Syllabus design is an art form itself.

At eSchool, we have taken structuring a course a step further with our simulations. Entire courses are built around dynamic storylines. This means that decisions made by students in lessons affect what happens in future lessons. Take our marketing course for example. At the start of the course, students decide with their peers which clients they want to work with. The clients they choose will affect the marketing campaigns they plan and the vendors they work with. We do this to make the courses more engaging. Students are invested in each decision because it will have an impact on what happens in later lessons.

#4 failing to track outcomes

The schools I worked with early in my career would conduct needs analyses of new students and share those notes with the teachers. Unfortunately, there was very little follow-up. At the end of the course, the students would get a certificate saying they completed the course, but they didn’t get anything that indicated whether or not the goals were met. The back of the certificate might say something like, “A student at this level SHOULD be able to…”, but certainly did not say what that student was ACTUALLY able to do.

Becoming a CELTA trainer helped me a lot in this area. This is when I first saw a portfolio-based assessment system in action. The criteria for lessons were clearly laid out, and by the end of the course the trainees could see their progress from the start to the end. Trainers and trainees could choose a criterion and say “At the start of the course this was not evident. Now, it’s been clearly demonstrated in the planning and teaching.”

I’m never looking back. In fact, at eSchool we’ve gone a step further. With the use of the Canvas LMS, we can not only say which specific outcomes the students have met and not met, but we can also see the degree to which students have met the objectives and which portfolio tasks the students were able to demonstrate them. The students receive detailed reports that show their performance on each outcome — something we feel is far more helpful than a certificate.