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Danilina V.
Teaching Business Communication to Management Students
Public administration and business management are intertwined nowadays. Students majoring in public administration can never be sure that they will not end up working for a business organization. Even those who join government ministries will have to act as effective planners, organizers, leaders, and controllers and as professional communicators. Therefore, management students, whether they are trained for public or private sectors, should get good knowledge of business issues and acquire business communication skills. Moreover, as the world is globalizing and more and more graduates find jobs in multinational corporations or communicate with foreign partners on a day-to-day basis, students need to develop their business skills not only in their native language, but also in English.
These tasks are successfully addressed at the Department of Foreign Languages, School of Public Administration, Lomonosov Moscow State University. A group of scholars working at the department have written many books both on communication studies and English language teaching1. Principles and methods used at the department have been formulated by its head, Professor Ludmila Minaeva, and further developed by her colleagues Tamara Borissenko, Tatiana Valentei, Ludmila Salieva, and others2.
Teaching business communication in English, we rely on acclaimed textbooks by David Cotton, Leo Jones, Bill Mascull and other authors3, but use mainly our own teaching
1 Речевая коммуникация в бизнесе / Под ред. Л.В. Минаевой. М., 2011; Речевая коммуникация в политике / Под ред. Л.В. Минаевой. М., 2007; Государственное управление: английский для академических целей. Учебное пособие / Под ред. Л.В. Минаевой. М., 2009; Минаева Л.В., Луканина М.В., Варченко В.В. I’m All Ears. Учебное пособие по развитию навыков аудирования речи на английском языке. М., 2010; Варченко В.В., Данилина В.В. English for Professional Communicators. Учебное пособие. М., 2010; and many more.
2 Борисенко Т.И. О прагмалингвистическом и морально-нравственном аспекте подготовки специалиста-управленца высшей школы // Вестник Московского университета. Сер. 21. Управление (государство и общество). 2008. № 4. С. 51-58; Валентей Т.В. The Role of Style in Effective Business Communication // Мир, язык, человек. Сборник статей. Владимир, 2008. С. 27-32; Салиева Л.К. Теория коммуникации и преподавание родного и иностранного языков // Прикладная лингвистика без границ. Материалы конференции (25-26 марта 2004 г.). СПб., 2004. С. 60-65.
3 Cotton D., Falvey D., Kent S. Market Leader. Intermediate Business English Course Book. Harlow, 2005; Cotton D., Falvey D., Kent S. Market Leader. Upper Intermediate Business English. Harlow, 2005; Jones L., Alexander R. New International Business English. Cambridge, 2002; Mascull B. Business Vocabulary in Use. Cambridge, 2002.
materials, both published4 and unpublished, aimed at our students, serving their professional needs, and adjusted to rapidly changing environment.
In the Business English course management students focus on the following skills: presentations, job interviews (supplemented by resumes and cover letters), business correspondence, and meetings. There is also some practice in telephoning without much emphasis on it. Negotiation principles and techniques fall outside the scope of Business English and are studied within the framework of a specialized course.
Presentations
The art of presentation is taught in accordance with the classical rhetorical tradition: observing and analyzing best practices, learning rules, doing exercises, and then preparing and delivering talks in certain contexts.
It is easy to find examples of public speaking on the internet, including recent talks by modern business leaders. YouTube videos can be used for teaching purposes both in class and at home. Students are highly motivated when they learn how to structure a talk and use visual aids by watching Steve Jobs’ presentation of iPad5, when they reconstruct rhetorical devices used by Bill Gates in his Harvard speech6, or when they try to reproduce Jack Welch’s gestures as in his Sacred Heart talk7.
A modern business presentation is almost unthinkable without PowerPoint slides. For many, a presentation has become synonymous with a slide show. Therefore, in addition to rules related to audience analysis, setting a purpose, formulating and developing a key idea, composing the introduction, the main body and the conclusion of a talk, using volume, pace, intonation, and gestures, maintaining eye-contact and answering questions, students learn how to prepare and use their slides.
Students should understand that the purpose of slides is to help the audience follow their ideas, not to remind the speaker what to say. Therefore slides should mainly contain illustrative material such as pictures, diagrams, maps, etc, not paragraphs of text. As James Humes once wrote, “visual aids should be used to reinforce, not replace the speech”. 8 If students prepare a beautifully designed slide show and then read their text from the screen,
4 Гзокян Л.А. Business and English. Деловой английский. М., 2007; Медведева Н.Ф., Валентей Т.В., ЛуканинаМ.В. «Business English is...»Part 1. Business and Businesses. М., 2004.
5 URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kplxBc2iw8M&feature=related
6 URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZKW5Gs6z7o&feature=relmfu
7 URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch/vHu z4sdeaE&feature=related
8 Humes J. Speak Like Churchill, Stand Like Lincoln. 21 Powerful Secrets of History’s Greatest Speakers. Roseville, 2002. P. 65.
even glancing at the audience from time to time, it is a complete failure. A series of commentaries on slides instead of a proper public speech is slightly better, but it is also unacceptable. Quoting James Humes again, “if you want to resign yourself to a technician’s role, keep on introducing a series of slides. But if you aim to be a leader, let your slides be a prop, not a crutch” 9
When it comes to preparing presentations, students are given creative business-related tasks, like the one described below:
1. Group together to form a team of 3 or 4. Invent an imaginary company in an industry of your choice: a restaurant chain, a fashion magazine, an oil and gas corporation, or any other business.
2. “Gather” information about this business: its mission, history, founding father, current leaders, goods or services the company produces, its key customers and markets, plans and aims.
3. Imagine that your company has just opened a new outlet/ subsidiary in a city and country of your choice. In order to generate publicity and attract new customers you have invited local journalists, opinion leaders and some potential customers to a company presentation followed by a tour and a reception. Prepare a 10-minute team presentation in which you should cover the mission, history, leadership, products, markets and vision of your company.
4. Deliver your presentation. Each team member will be responsible for one or two parts of your talk.
5. Ask your classmates (audience members) for feedback.
Resumes, Cover Letters, Job Interviews
Recruitment and selection issues usually arouse students’ enthusiasm because they learn how to sell themselves effectively on the labor market and get their dream jobs. This part of the course is based on the behaviorist approach according to which a job seeker should position himself or herself as a solution to prospective employer’s problems and prove it by means of a resume, a cover letter, and answers to interview questions10.
Students learn how to write a resume at the starting point of their career when their work experience is confined to internships, summer jobs, university projects, and volunteering. Then they try to imagine their career in 10-years time and modify resumes as if they already were accomplished professionals. Resume layout and ideas for its content are
9 Ibid. P. 64.
10 Tucker K., Derelian D., Rouner, D. Public Relations Writing. An Issue-Driven Behavioral Approach. Upper Saddle River, 1997. P. 312-325.
partly suggested in teaching materials, partly derived from sample resumes and Microsoft Office templates11. Being used to searching for information on the internet, students easily find models to follow and apply creativity in order to write a successful resume.
When a resume is ready, the next step is to write a cover letter that would persuade a recruiter to invite an applicant for a job interview. Students should realize that the success of a cover letter depends largely on how well they know this particular organization because they have to highlight skills, qualities and experience that make them ideal candidates for this particular job.
A typical structure of a cover letter is shown in teaching materials, but students are also encouraged to analyze sample cover letters found on the internet and adjust Microsoft Office templates12 for their purposes.
Turning to the interview stage, students learn the most typical interview questions, get advice and practice answering them, watch and analyze interview videos from YouTube, like “Interview Dos and Don’ts”13, and then simulate their own job interviews. Job interview simulation may be recorded for subsequent evaluation, which will give students an opportunity to look at themselves and improve their interview techniques. A video from one of our classes devoted to job interviews can be found on YouTube14.
For a job interview simulation, students work in pairs (“the interviewer” and “the candidate”), choose a company and a vacancy, discuss the company’s peculiarities and problems, and formulate job description and requirements that could be found in an advertisement for this vacancy. Alternatively, they may find a real job advertisement on a job search website and take all the details from there. After that “the interviewer” and “the candidate” prepare separately. “The candidate” reviews his or her resume, writes a cover letter suitable for the chosen position and sends both documents to “the interviewer”. “The interviewed’ prepares questions that would help to evaluate the job seeker’s qualities and suitability for the position. It is important to avoid showing questions to “the candidate”, who tries to predict them and prepares answers. Finally, “the interviewer” and “the candidate” simulate their interview in class without any rehearsal. Business Correspondence
Business correspondence includes letters, emails, and memos. Students learn about the most popular formats of these documents and focus on different types of letters (or emails): invitations and replies to invitations, thank-you letters, fundraising letters, enquiries
11 URL: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/templates/results.aspx?qu=resumes
12 URL: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/templates/results.aspx?qu=letters&av=zwd#
13 URL: http://www.voutube.com/watch?v=S1ucmfPOBV8
14 URL: http ://youtu.be/4DPvyAr0XLY
and replies to enquiries, complaints and replies to complaints. They exchange formal invitations as if they wrote to ambassadors or CEOs, thank fellow students as if they were deans, try to raise funds as if they worked for non-profit organizations, analyze sample replies that can be found on specialized websites15 and write letters that could precede them.
Students enjoy exchanging letters with each other under imaginary circumstances. A teacher may invent all kinds of tasks aimed at improving letter-writing skills depending on the group’s professional orientation and personal preferences, or encourage students to come up with possible scenarios. A task may look like this:
“You have just been appointed the head of the Customer Service Department of a chain of healthy food restaurants called “Tasty Diet”. There are three other employees in your department (team up with your classmates to form a group of four). Please, write a memo to your subordinates outlining the main strategies of responding to incoming mail.
Today you have received three emails: an enquiry about your restaurant menu and prices from Ms. Mary White; a complaint from Ms. Jane Black, who has gained weight after lunching in your restaurant for two weeks and is very upset about extra 5 pounds of fat; an invitation from a local winery to wine tasting signed by James Grey, the Managing Director (your restaurant doesn’t serve alcoholic beverages). Distribute the tasks: each of your subordinates should reply to one of these emails. Then check whether the group members have followed the principles reflected in your memo.”
This case study is connected with a business organization, but the same skills can be applied to public administration, as government officials often have to write replies to citizens’ enquiries and complaints, and the more letters students write, the better they will be able to perform this part of their future professional duties. One can learn standard formats of business letters in a few minutes, but it takes years to become a skillful communicator who knows what to write, to whom to write, how to write and on what occasion.
Meetings
Another important area of business communication is meetings. Both public and private managers spend a large proportion of their working time participating in all kinds of discussions. Therefore, it is important to develop skills of chairing and participating in meetings. Students should practice the so-called deliberative speech aimed at consulting with the audience on future actions instead of applying the other two branches of rhetoric, forensic (concerned with past events) and epideictic (concerned with praise or blame) distinguished by Aristotle16. It is quite
15URL: http://www.writeletters.net/
16Аристотель. Риторика. Поэтика. М., 2000. С. 14-15.
difficult to refrain from accusations at some business meetings, but students should get used to focusing not on problems but on solutions, not on past mistakes but on action points.
To make sure that discussion is focused and constructive, there should be an agenda, and to guarantee that action points are implemented as agreed, it is necessary to write the minutes of the meeting reflecting actions, deadlines, and names of people responsible for each action. Samples and templates of both documents can be found in textbooks and on the internet. Students may be asked to conduct a meeting on the basis of an agenda and minutes, and/or to compose an agenda and minutes for a meeting in imaginary circumstances.
Online videos may include professional advice like “6 Secrets of Effective Meetings17”, meeting simulations like in the video downloaded by Adam Smith College Business Center18, and real business meetings like an annual meeting of Google’s stockholders19. Watching these videos students answer questions, note down certain phrases, summarize key points, and at the same time get a complete picture of what a business meeting looks like, observing models to follow in their own meetings.
Students’ own meetings take place in the form of role plays that may involve from 3 to 15 people. Teachers may devise role plays themselves, providing description of a real or imaginary situation and role cards for participants. For example:
“You are members of the board of directors of the “Show and Sell” advertising agency that produces newspaper and magazine ads, as well as TV and radio commercials. Recently you have experienced difficulties because many clients cannot or do not want to invest money in traditional advertising. What should you do to retain existing clients, persuade them to use your services more extensively and attract new clients? Meet to discuss this problem and find solutions.”
This description is followed by role cards for ten participants including the CEO, the CFO, six vice presidents, and two non-executive directors, each with specific attitudes, preferences and persuasions, belonging to particular age groups and, in case of vice presidents, protecting the interests of particular departments.
Apart from developing meeting skills, such role plays help students improve their interpersonal communication, because they learn to listen to each other, to take into account each other’s opinions, to interpret and predict each other’s reactions, and to make joint decisions.
17 URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSft2OeMmzO
18 URL: http://www.voutube.com/watch?v=HS4KmZaIEE0&feature=related
19 URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DSqYI5sess&feature=relmfu
Conclusion
It is impossible to ignore the fact that modern students are “digital natives” who always consult their iPads and iPhones and prefer to receive information from online sources both in verbal and visual formats. Therefore, a university course, and in particular a practically oriented course like Business Communication or Business English, cannot be confined to one or two textbooks. Teachers should encourage their students to surf the web and find samples of practical application of various principles, to watch and analyze videos that are easier to remember than written texts. It is also important to constantly update teaching materials with the help of internet resources. No textbook can reflect all the recent changes and trends because a textbook is static and the surrounding world is dynamic. It does not mean that we should give up using textbooks altogether, but they have to be supplemented by online materials.
Teaching management students, we should help them to become professional communicators who will make effective presentations, skillfully write letters and emails, and participate effectively in meetings and interviews. At the same time, it is part of our job to encourage them to develop creativity and non-standard thinking by means of simulations, role plays and case studies. Carrying out tasks together with their classmates, such as team presentations, meetings, or interviews, students become better team-players. Looking at issues from various perspectives, they become flexible and tolerant to other people’s opinions. In short, communication classes help students to become better managers who meet the requirements of modern times and can contribute to success of their organizations.
Bibliography:
1. Аристотель. Риторика. Поэтика. М., 2000.
2. Борисенко Т.И. О прагмалингвистическом и морально-нравственном аспекте подготовки специалиста-управленца высшей школы // Вестник Московского университета. Сер. 21. Управление (государство и общество). 2008. № 4. С. 51-58.
3. Валентей Т.В. The Role of Style in Effective Business Communication // Мир, язык, человек. Сборник статей. Владимир, 2008. С. 27-32.
4. Варченко В.В., Данилина В.В. English for Professional Communicators. Учебное пособие. М., 2010.
5. Гзокян Л.А. Business and English. Деловой английский. М., 2007.
6. Государственное управление: английский для академических целей. Учебное пособие / Под ред. Л.В. Минаевой. М., 2009.
7. Медведева Н.Ф., Валентей Т.В., Луканина М.В. «Business English is...» Part 1. Business and Businesses. М., 2004.
8. Минаева Л.В., Луканина М.В., Варченко В.В. I’m All Ears. Учебное пособие по развитию навыков аудирования речи на английском языке. М., 2010.
9. Речевая коммуникация в бизнесе / Под ред. Л.В. Минаевой. М., 2011.
10. Речевая коммуникация в политике / Под ред. Л.В. Минаевой. М., 2007.
11. Салиева Л.К. Теория коммуникации и преподавание родного и иностранного языков // Прикладная лингвистика без границ. Материалы конференции (25-26 марта 2004 г.). СПб., 2004. С. 60-65.
12. Cotton D., Falvey D., Kent S. Market Leader. Intermediate Business English Course Book. Harlow, 2005.
13. Cotton D., Falvey D., Kent S. Market Leader. Upper Intermediate Business English. Harlow, 2005.
14. Humes J. Speak Like Churchill, Stand Like Lincoln. 21 Powerful Secrets of History’s Greatest Speakers. Roseville, 2002.
15. JonesL., Alexander R. New International Business English. Cambridge, 2002.
16. MascullB. Business Vocabulary in Use. Cambridge, 2002.
17. Tucker K., Derelian D., Rouner, D. Public Relations Writing. An Issue-Driven Behavioral Approach. Upper Saddle River, 1997.
Online Resources
18. 2012 Annual Meeting of Stockholders. URL:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DSqYI5sess&feature=relmfu (Accessed 6 September 2012).
19. 6 Secrets of Effective Meetings. URL:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSft2OeMmzO (Accessed 6 September 2012).
20. Apple Announces iPad. Part 1 of 10. URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kplxBc2iw8M&feature=related (Accessed 6 September 2012).
21. Bill Gates Speech at Harvard. Part 5. URL:
http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=1 ZKW 5 Gs6z7 o&feature=relmfu (Accessed 6
September 2012).
22. How to Conduct a Meeting. Full Meeting. URL:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HS4KmZaIEE0&feature=related (Accessed 6
September 2012).
23. Interview Dos and Don’ts. URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1ucmfPOBV8 (Accessed 6 September 2012).
24. Jack Welch’s 3 Great Advice. Sacred Heart Talk. URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ju z4sdeaE&feature=related (Accessed 6 September 2012).
25. Job Interview Simulation in a Business English Class. URL: http://youtu.be/4DPvyAr0XLY (Accessed 6 September 2012).
26. Office Templates. URL: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/templates/?CTT=97 (Accessed 6 September 2012).
27. Write Letters. URL: http://www.writeletters.net/ (Accessed 6 September 2012).
