Coming up: A Business English/ ESP blog carnival

As announced by Larry Ferlazzo, coming up on 1 November, there’ll be a blog carnival – that is, a round-up of posts submitted by bloggers for the purpose – dedicated to the teaching of Business English and English for Special Purposes, here on this blog.  If you’re a blogger, please use this form to submit your post. If you’re not a blogger (yet) but would like to write an article to share, I’d be most delighted to have you guest blog here.

This particular blog carnival came into being when Carl Dowse was rounding up blogs dedicated to Business English in a links list for BESIG, the Business English Special Interest Group of IATEFL. The conversation brought to light that there are just a few blogs that focus completely on business, like Evan Frendo’s “English for the Workplace“, Jeremy Day’s “Specific English“, the Business Spotlight blogs by Deborah Capras, Helen Strong and Robert Gibson, or Jeffrey Hill’s “The English Blog: Business“. But even writers for and teachers of Business English will treat non-business topics in their blogs; just think of Vicki Hollett’s “Learning to speak ‘merican” or Karenne Sylvester’s “Kalinago English“. Then, teachers of general English are highly respected and much read in the BE/ ESP community, like Alex Case of “TEFLtastic“, Larry Ferlazzo of “Websites of the Day” or Jamie Keddie,  etc. etc. Plenty of teachers – including many readers of this blog! – cross over on a daily basis between teaching young learners, giving general English classes and handling business English groups, and they must have interesting lesson ideas to share to introduce themselves to a more specialized, business-focussed readership. The round-up of blogposts will also be published on the BESIG website – so new readers are guaranteed!

So I’d like to extend a very warm invitation to all of you, from the specialist to the generalist, to contribute to this upcoming event. Just make sure that your entry is indeed geared to Business English or ESP, that is: the English people need at work. Have a look at the form, please, and let me know whether you’ll be joining us.