Scholarship winners

This year as in past years we have offered five scholarships to our annual conference. We are pleased to announce the following winners, who will all be speaking at the conference. Congratulations to the winners!

Dr. Abdul Wahid Mohammad Usmani has been engaged in teaching Business English, Business Communication, Communication Skills and English for Medical Purpose for the last 10 years. He has taught these courses at several universities and institutes as an adjunct faculty. As a regular faculty member, he has been engaged in teaching Business Communication at a public sector institution in Pakistan.

During his professional career, he introduced several measures in teaching Business Communication, e.g. BC through Simulation in all the institutions where he taught. Furthermore, he served as an expert of Business Communication and Presentation Skills and evaluated students’ performance at the Institute of Cost and Management Accountants. In addition, he is serving as a paper setter and examiner of Business Communication of the same institute.

By attending this conference, he will be able to first share his experience of teaching Business Communication with the world of BE. This sharing would lead to reviewing his own practices in the light of comments and suggestions from participants. Last but not the least, the networking that he would be exposed to at this conference would continue giving him benefits as a BE professional in the long run.

Amlaku Bikss Eshetie is an Ethiopian and a lecturer at Hawassa University/Ethiopia. In qualifications, he did a BA degree in Foreign Languages and Literature (English and French) and a MA degree in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) both at Addis Ababa University in 1997 and 2005, respectively.

His experience of work (teaching) ranges from teaching primary/elementary school pupils to tertiary/university students. The subject he has taught includes English for New Ethiopia (grades 3, 5, 9, 11 and 12), Freshman English Vols I and II (FLEn 101 & FLEn 102), Business English for Office Secretaries, Business English for Accountants & Marketers, and English for Hoteliers.

Of all the areas he has taught, he has become very much attracted to the area of Business English in general, including Hotel English. To substantiate that this interest has been since the time of his graduate studies, his thesis research was in the English for Specific Purposes (ESP) realm of English language teaching.

However, in the course of his teaching career, he has only been able to attend training, seminars, workshops and conferences only at local and national level. Moreover, if he wants to attend such events away from his localities (e.g. BESIG), the finance is stringent constraint; he earns a monthly salary of only USD $260 on which his whole family lives on.

Anna Gevorgyan has been teaching English as a foreign language in Armenia for eight years now and has had experience in teaching both general English and ESP. Her expertise in teaching ESP has not been restricted to business English only, yet the latter is the area she feel most comfortable with. She has taught Business English for the past four years and has enjoyed working with adult learners who have the mastery of business. Her recent thesis work on differentiated instruction has further expanded her knowledge of meeting individual students' needs and styles and has taken her to the path of finding the optimal ways for meeting the needs of business people, which are always diverse and varied.

The BESIG conference will give her a chance to see the multi-dimensional and dynamic field of ESP professionals, will grant a great opportunity to share experience and to gain more skills, as well as enlarge the scope of her teaching capacity. She will particularly appreciate being exposed to the expertise of various professionals and experts who have been practicing ESP for many years and gain more insights into how to blend the accepted norms with fresh ideas and concepts.

Her presentation here has been given already earlier in 2005 in Georgia at the bi-annual Caucasus Regional ELT conference and received good and positive feedback. Ever since then she has further elaborated her skills and work-scope to consider the multiplism in teaching and to bring in special flavor into ESP.

Doriana Boc Andrasescu has graduated from The West University in Timisoara, Romania, in 2006. At present, she is a Language Trainer in General and Business English and Italian, at a private language center. She has a two year experience in the field, which she considers revealing but insufficient altogether. Her experience is basically composed out of both the failed and successful classes she has taught, by the local trainings she has attended and by the mentoring sessions she has benefitted from as a trainee.

Now she has reached the moment that, in her opinion, every language trainer gets to, i.e. the self awareness of her limitations and the need to improve outside the borders of the place she has been instructed in. She has never attended an international conference and this opportunity is, undoubtedly, a starting point for her career to be. The BESIG organization has been presented to her by her colleagues who have shared their most grateful feelings for having been able to attend a conference of a kind.

She is more than willing to join and get to know, share ideas and communicate with language trainers just like her or more experienced. Keeping in touch and bonding would make our learning process easier and enjoyable.

Honestly, she has not been able to take advantage properly of the information she was given. It was only when she started teaching business English that she realized what teaching that particular field in English implied. Therefore, she considers her participation at the BESIG conference revealing for her as a teacher, for her colleagues, as trainees and last but not least for her students for whom she is responsible in the learning process. She believes she is ready to take this step and pass it on to those that need it.

Tatyana Tolstova: Business English has always been part of her professional career. After she graduated from the English Language Department of Samara State University/Russia in 1991 she started to work as translator and interpreter at a big manufacturing company (at present she is a member of Union of Translators of Russia which in turn is a member of International Federation of Translators) where her responsibilities included keeping business correspondence, interpreting at meetings and negotiations, etc.

In 1993 she joined Samara Business Development Centre operating under the EC TACIS project on providing technical assistance to former Soviet states. There she gained a most valuable experience in co-operating with European organisations and companies. For nearly ten years (1994-2004) she was co-ordinating an international educational project on establishing Management education at Samara State University.

In 2000 she was offered a teaching post at the International University in Moscow (Volga Branch) and to strengthen her academic position in 2002 she started a post-graduate course at Moscow State University. The theme of her dissertation was Business English (its grammar aspect). The same year she started teaching Business English at International University which she continues to the present time. Last spring she successfully defended my dissertation and got a PhD in Linguistics.

This year her university won a project funded by the Regional Ministry of Education on teaching Business English to secondary school teachers. So she started a series of short-term courses which turned out to be a success and got a very favourable feedback from schools. A couple of them even introduced Business English into their curriculum as an optional course, while the others are incorporating Business English aspect into the existing English Language syllabus.

In 2004 she first learnt about Corpus Linguistics at the English Language Institute of the University of Michigan where she spent 3 months as a visiting research scholar. So she immediately thought that a corpus of Business English could help both the trainers and students. She knows that this year the plenary speaker at the BESIG Conference will be Mike McCarthy speaking on Doing business with a spoken corpus, so she thought that it would be extremely important and beneficial for her to attend this conference, to listen to the speakers and to make her own presentation on using Corpus Linguistics in.