Conference report: Ilangovan Padmanaban

Ilangovan was one of three winners of the BESIG conference scholarship 2005. Below are his reports on the sessions he attended as well as interviews with some of the delegates.

Reports of the talks that I attended, in diary form

9 – 10 AM: 12 November 2005: Room: 1

Volunteering to listen to Charles La Fond talk on Student Presentations: Delusions or reality? at the International University of Monaco (IUM), I heard him preface his talk with the observation that “most managers have been found to be scared of Presentations (P)” and follow it up with an outline of his Presentation Pentagon that explicated IMPACT, ANALYSIS, STRUCTURE, TOOLS and INTERACTION.

His standard presentation formula required trainees to catch audience’s attention, establish rapport and state purpose at the introductory stage – by making use of findings of studies on how we communicate, where words account for 7%, body language 55% and vocal aspects the rest, La Fond stressed good floor contact and good eye contact with the presenter’s hands above belt-line (thereby avoiding a slump in the shoulders if the hands were to hang below the belt-line, projecting a negative image) when presenting, provide main points and substantiating data in the body of the presentation and restate main and sub-points, make a conclusion and ask for specific action at the summarizing stage.

During the Q&A session his advice on using visual aids to students included using seven words per line and seven lines per slide, showing visual when talking about it, practising, not overdoing it and finally avoiding ‘bells & whistles’ in the PowerPoint.

10.30 – 11.15 AM: 12 November 2005: Room: 15

Next, listening to “A little bit about small talk” by Evan Frendo I got the insight that Work Talk (WT) could be mixed with Small Talk (ST).

Tracing the history of ways of thinking about ST from Malinowski’s 1923 treatment of it as mere relationship-building (or, ‘phatic communion’) to Janet Holmes’ recent conceptualization of it as a movement from core to phatic communion, Frendo pointed out that ST was very common in the workplace and that it tends to occur during openings and closings of meetings.

Terming ST as relational turn-taking, Frendo touched upon its linguistic perspective by commenting on the formulaic character of ST as well as listeners’ backchannelling and longer interactional phrases. As for an intercultural perspective, he showed how routine moves, silence and topics could be different in different cultures: Germans might greet, ask how the other was and then move on to business; Iranians on the other hand may after greeting move on to questions about the family before moving on to business. A genre perspective is provided when we understand that storytelling, commenting, joke-telling, gossip, sending up (teasing) and chatting occur. Bitching, gossip, complaining and troubles talk are characteristic of a gender perspective.

Admitting that ST was slippery to define, Frendo went on to outline a strategy to teach ST: “Get students to move from ‘core business talk’ to the ‘banal’ and back again.”

14.00 – 15.00 PM: 12 November 2005: Room: 1

“Solving business dilemmas” (on behalf of Longman’s) by Tonya Trappe was next. Her Intelligent Business (IB) is produced in association with The Economist and uses dilemmas in order to bridge the gap between theory and practice.

Making use of the Economist’s focus on larger issues that impact business, the authors chose a unit such as Lobbies (finding a voice). ‘Making a case’ in the section on Career Skills (p. 107) that are important for setting up the dilemmas presents phrases (e.g., “Wouldn’t you agree that…? It’s obvious that… I’m sure you must agree that…) that students can expect their listeners to agree with. Trappe pointed out that they could then build on these to make their case.

Trappe then asked the audience to work in groups to convince a restaurant owner to pay the same salary to his employees to work for 35 hours / week that he was paying them to work for 40 hours / week. Another scenario she gave was convincing a restaurant owner to change it into a non-smoking establishment. At least two groups came up with the convincing argument that the less customers smoked the more they would eat and drink in the restaurant At the end of the role-plays, the audience understood what the ‘business dilemmas’ was about.

15.30 – 16.30 PM: 12 November 2005: Room: 37

Listening to Pat Pledger talk on “There’s more to human resources than hiring and firing…” I discovered that the phenomenon of globalization had made English essential across the range of HR functions. For example, recruits in multi-nationals are from different countries and therefore consolidation of personnel issues and delivery of training programmes are in English. In addition, executive job-searches and internet job searches are conducted in English.

She next listed the topical issues in HR: Equal pay, age discrimination / pensions, Coaching or Mentoring at work, Flexitime, Organizational change, Performance management, Reward, Costs & Headcount, Leadership development, Diversity, Outsourcing, Maternity / Paternity / Parental issues and policies.

Pledger then suggested some main topics of HR for training: Resourcing-recruitment: writing up a recruitment strategy, calling for internal / external recruitment sources and advertisement, writing up job descriptions and person specifications; Resourcing-selection: writing up job ads (including on-line job ads), interviewing (interpreting CVs / questioning), selection process (checking references / temps / outsourcing), ageism; Employee relations: contracts of employment, disciplinary and grievance procedures, health and safety at work; HR development: personnel management (appraisals, staff evaluation), staff problems (flexi working hours / mentoring), equal opportunities, training; Reimbursement and reward: fringe benefits (perks), pay, employee retention and Industrial relations: role of trade unions, labour relations, wage negotiation (a non-issue in UK, but an issue in Germany).

17.00 – 17.30 PM: 12 November 2005: Room: MBA, 2nd floor

The last one for the day was Jayne Tomlins’ “Presentation on PowerPoint: a valid evaluation component?”

Tomlins presented on a team teaching course she co-taught with a professor from the USA. The courses that they taught were – Family Business, International Marketing and Monetary Economics.

Speaking on the benefits of oral presentations, Tomlins pointed out improvements in motivation, involvement, group dynamics (student bonding) and speaking in English with teacher.

Input Phase I, she reported, required her to present the language of cause and effect, summarizing and describing trends and movements in graphs. Teaching the language of cause and effect by making use of topics such as “What starts off a downward spiral in the economy”, Tomlins introduced phrases such as ‘fall in spendable income,’ ‘laying off workers,’ ‘fall in demand’ and ‘results in’ to the group.

During Phase II students chose from topics such as CD PIRACY, DIGITAL TERRESTRIAL TV, TELEWORK, INTERNET USE AMONG STUDENTS.

Phase III comprised students gathering the data on a questionnaire and interpreting it.

Phase IV saw students, who were to present in groups of three, brushing up on PowerPoint skills, techniques and language for presentations.

She finally spoke on the pitfalls to avoid: learning by heart, reading out slides and whether it was their own work. She also said that presentations could be difficult to assess.

9.00 – 10.00 PM: 13 November 2005: Room: 135

Eric Baber presented new technologies including Hot Potatoes, Podcasting and Internet conferencing in his talk, “The use of ICT in Business English teaching.”

Baber presented the Speedlingua (CD-ROM) that provides NS-quality pronunciation feedback on texts read by students into mike, Cleverlearn (from Germany) – a service that sends back German text translated into English via mobile phone on requisitioning, Hot Potatoes – whose wizard creates gap-fills, drag-and-drops, crosswords, cloze, multiple-choice and hangman, that also needs a site to host it there, Blogs – teacher-provided feedback on students’ writing on their blogs can be read, and collaborated on by others as well, after they log in; an advantage is that blogs unlike e-mails can be archived, Related technology to Blogs: RSS feeds (Really Simple Syndication) – enables teacher to check students’ blogs on subscribing to the RSS Reader that checks the sites to see if they have been updated, as manual checking of students’ blogs could be time-consuming, Podcasting – audio files (e.g., BBC programme podcasts) downloaded to an I-pod or other device can be listened to and worked on by students, Wiktionary (a WIKI) – an online dictionary – once teacher sets up a wiki, students can work on it that teacher can keep track of anytime, unlike e-mailing or word documents and Internet Conferencing – Windows NetMeeting with audio, video and a Whiteboard – that can on being uploaded open on students screens as well. Students can save their lessons and student-teacher / student-student interactions can occur.

9.00 – 10.00 PM: 13 November 2005: Room: 135

The final talk that I listened to was Nick Brieger’s “Success with BULATS” (on behalf of Summertown Publishing) that Brieger himself referred to as a “quick and dirty” text for coping with BULATS.

Brieger presented Success with BULATS as a replication of the online test (that is either on a CD or downloaded from the Net) – a quick, computer-adaptive test – that correlates with ALTE scores. Candidates who are placed in one of the six levels (that corroborate with ALTE levels) either take all the four modules – Reading, Listening, Grammar & Vocabulary or choose an ALTE level and one of the modules.

Mirroring BULATS, Success has Reading and Listening specifications that parallel the online test’s format as regards these two modules. As for the Vocabulary resource, there is a 500-item vocabulary item bank that has entries drawn from the following fields –

General business
Human Resources
Marketing
Production
Finance

Reports of my interviews with conference participants:

Renata Mikloska

Renata Mikloska is a Croatian who works for a Private Language school. She said that there were no public institutes today that offer Business English courses in Croatia. However, she said that General English was being offered in Public schools, though no specialized courses such as Business English were on offer.

Claire Jackson

Claire Jackson is a Freelance teacher who works in-company in Switzerland.

On being asked about teachers of BE in Switzerland, she said that teaching to students’ needs and efficiency seem to be the watchword of teachers there.

When asked about her experience of attending conferences such as the BESIG annual conference, she said that it “expands mental horizons.”

Ludmilla Fedorova

Ludmilla Fedorova is a Russian teacher of Business English who has put in almost 35 years of service (thereby making her probably the senior-most at the gathering in Monaco!). She works for a government language institute in Russia.

Besides teaching Business English in Russia, Fedorova has also taught in India, where she taught for more than three years. She reported that she has fond memories of having taught there!

On being asked about her experience of being at the BESIG conference, she replied using superlatives. I could see that she was having a blast, in a manner of speaking!