Thoughts from the IATEFL ‘English in the Workplace’ symposium

April 16th, 2010
by Valentina Dodge

I was lucky enough to attend the ‘English for the Workplace’ Symposium at IATEFL. All the speakers were wonderful, but it was a comment from Dr Amna Mohamed Bedri that caught my attention most.
According to Dr Bedri, the goal of English for Special Purposes is this: For the learner to acquire higher competence in their field of ESP than an average native speaker.

It’s an interesting thought, and one that has big implications for how English for the workplace should be taught. When a teacher teaches  English for the workplace, he or she is always teaching English for Special Purposes as well - that is, he or she is teaching English for the Special Purpose of meeting the needs of that specific workplace. And the teacher will never know the needs of the workplace as well as the learners will!

For all that there are differences between workplaces, there are also cultural differences between the locations of different workplaces - Martina Mbayu’s insights, developed from her years of teaching English in Cameroon (where English is a minority language), were very different from Dr Bedri’s in Khartoum.

I was reminded of Nick Robinson’s excellent presentation on ESP from the previous day, where he explained good ESP practice as a collaboration between language specialists (i.e. teachers) and professional specialists (i.e. the learners). The teachers are (usually) not part of the same discourse community as their learners - Doctors and Lawyers, for example, have very specialised language systems that teachers don’t know. That’s why collaboration is so important.

At the Symposium, Dr Sofija Micic expanded on this idea. She presented on the development of a course in Medical English for Doctors training at Belgrade University, pointing out that Doctors needed to know technical, sub-technical, and layman’s terms for every type of medical condition - a far larger medical vocabulary than any average native speaker – or average teacher – would ever have!

The question that all this raises for me is this:

If it is difficult for a skilled, intelligent, responsive teacher to teach English for the Workplace, is it even possible to create a coursebook specific enough to support them?

The answer, I think, is ‘no’. Coursebooks must by their nature be broad-ranging, and English for the workplace must by its nature be highly specific. However good the coursebook is, it will never be able to meet the exact needs of both a mining company in Sudan and a soft-drinks distributor in Cameroon!

All of this made me remember why I love working on English360. It’s the only tool I know where you can mix general coursebook material with very specific, specially made material. As Cleve Miller, the CEO of English360, explained in his presentation, you need a combination of both to meet the real, on-the-ground needs of learners, but just as importantly, you need both to meet the real, on-the-ground needs of workplaces. The workplaces are, after all, the ones who pay the bills!

If the best ESP teaching is a collaboration between teachers and learners, then maybe the best support for ESP is a kind of collaboration as well - a ‘collaboration’ between general, carefully structured, all-purpose coursebooks and specific, workplace-tailored content.

After all, just as learners know things that teachers don’t, so teachers know things that publishers don’t. And it’s wonderful to be part of a project that is setting that knowledge free at last.

Links:

Jeremy Day interviews Cleve Miller about ESP on the ‘Specific English’ blog:

Nick Robinson on Twitter:

Nick Robinson’s ESP podcast on PEO

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