Tandem teaching

Could tandem teaching work as a business model? So: The corporate client books a two-day course for a large-ish group of staff  and gets not one, but two trainers to come in to run the session. The trainers take it in turns: One runs an activity while the other collects vocabulary on the board and […]

Nancy Duarte: The secret structure of great talks

In her great analysis of famous speeches, presentation guru Nancy Duarte (www.duarte.com) says that the most effective talks, the ones that make people change the way they think, move back and forth between what is and what could be. She analyzes Steve Job’s introduction of the iPhone speech and shows that the way he marvels […]

Focusing on communication strategies instead of language per se

Last Saturday Evan Frendo gave us at ELTABB an absolutely excellent presentation on the latest research in Business English, focusing on four key areas: English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), Communities of Practice, Intercultural Communication and Lexis and Genre/ Corpus Linguistics. His presentation and handout are here: scroll down to the bottom for all the […]

Sys admin

We’ve had such bizarre trouble with our landline for weeks now, with virtual repairmen who didn’t show up and left messages with the helpline hours later. My work was piling up, and my blood pressure was rising. And then the MacBook Pro had trouble with the software on the Vodafone mobile stick that I was […]

iCloud: iUnderstand

This is one of Steve Job’s last presentations, still explaining “his” products with inspired simplicity and clarity. Focus with me for a moment on his metalanguage (often called signposting), that is the language he uses to take us from one point to the next. Metalanguage or signposting varies widely between presentation types, and is generally […]

The future of business English trainers

I’m thinking about professional development, where the next years will take me. At the moment there is a lot of work to prepare for a few compact seminars, and more translation work for a client, so I’m not exactly unemployed. Still, having gone through the Trinity DipTESOL (still have to write up two papers, but […]

Job interview

For the Trinity assessed lesson, my class did job interviews. I can warmly recommend the topic to other teachers who have to do a Trinity diploma or DELTA assessed lesson, especially if your class is as motivated as ours was, and job interviews are in fact on their agenda. It obviously helps to choose a […]