Using Authentic Materials in ESP class
The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery
The art of teaching as any art involves inspiration and creativity enlighten by teacher for assisting students to start a discovery for themselves. Course books are only colorfully designed and intelligently packed materials for strangers, but it is a role of the teacher to bring it to a real life and to make a great educational impact on the learner. It can be seen as a challenging task, especially for teachers, who teach ESP courses. As the syllabi and the books often lack sufficient materials for constructing a framework for the artwork. Sometimes it takes a lot of effort to produce a masterpiece that will leave a lasting impression and persuade students to dig deeply in the subject matter.
Internet and local media in English can provide good sources for enriching the book materials and making teaching more sophisticated because it sometimes have undesirable effect due to cultural effect: often teachers as well students have difficulties with them.
A topic about ‘Business News' can be one of the most challenging topics for teaching business students, who have a very limited and abstract understanding on how the first item of the news namely ‘Stock Exchange' works in real life. Therefore, teachers did research on money and financial markets using many different sources, especially, more detailed research was effective on focusing on London Stock Exchange. The motto of it ‘Dictum meum pactum' (My word is my bond) served very well for a topic of the class ‘Money and Financial Markets'. At the beginning of the class students made a discussion about the motto and summed it up with the following statement: ‘It is very important to keep your promises both in life and in business.'
Acquiring reading and listening skills for understanding business news and reading the headlines about stock exchange was a primary aim of the class. As this class was the last class on a general topic ‘Describing Trends' (Unit 9 in the book) a warm-up exercise ‘The Happiness Graph" was a good icebreaking activity at the beginning of the class. Drawing students' happiness graph for the last week and comparing each other graphs by asking questions like: ‘Why were you so happy on Wednesday?', ‘What was wrong last week?', etc was a fun. They practiced not only speaking skills but also Past Simple Tense with new words for describing trends: reached a peak, hit a low, leveled off, etc.
Furthermore, a discussion about quotes about money and finance lead smoothly into a presentation of the new topic (see the lesson plan) that started from a picture from ‘The Economist'. Students were asked about the people, the place and the numbers. They all agreed that the place was stock exchange, people were brokers and the numbers were share prices on the billboard. Next, a clip downloaded from the BBC about stock exchange for pre-intermediate students of Business English with very detailed explanations about the topic included listening for general meaning and listening for specific information. It helped students to understand the five minutes Business News about stock exchanges from the course book on page 106 in the Unit 9. Also, it included the same tasks as in the above exercise such as listening for general and specific information.
An introduction of the next sub-topic started with reading a passage from ‘The UK Independent' newspaper about the most successful investors on the major stock exchanges. (See the lesson plan) After that, using the words and phrases from the text, students talked about the economy and stock exchange in their own country and made discussion in groups about imaginary putting &1,000 for profit into stocks. Headlines from local English newspapers and other sources about stock exchanges were cut and glued on the worksheets. Reading the headlines and telling if it described changes up & down, large & small assisted them for filling the table with verbs for describing trends & changes and doing similar exercise in the ‘Business Objective Workbook'.
Finally, speaking activity in the course book was supplied with a model conversation between an investor and a broker, which was useful for pre-intermediate students. At the end of this activity, they completed a lesson record: three new words, three useful phrases and general things to remember from this class. Interestingly, most of them could recall much more words and phrases from the lesson and most of them wanted to do the further research into the subject due to a discovery that stock exchanges actually reveal economy of a country and business performances of the most influential public companies. Home assignment was given from the workbook, which incorporated reading headlines and matching headlines with texts.
This lesson assisted students not only to make many discoveries in a specialized language of Business English such as understanding the register of spoken and written texts for describing trends but also inspired them to learn more about investors and financial markets. Teachers were able to create a solid base where students can turn the Business English around them for their advantage. However, as it can be seen from the above lesson plan to achieve it they must be inspired and eager for doing some extra work for supplying the course book with moving, useful and up-to-date activities as course books would not provide teachers with detailed plans but only with general ideas as in a case of ‘Business News' in the ‘Business Objectives' course book by Vicki Hollett.
Bibliography
Hollett, V (2006) Business Objectives, Oxford University Press
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