Guilherme Barum

Second Presentation at SBS Bookstore

2006-08-11T19:07:00.000-03:00

This afternoon from 2:30-5:30 we repeated the Business English presentation that was done in May.

The teachers who attended will find the outline of the presentation below, dated May 12.

It was a great pleasure.

Multiculturalism

2006-07-19T11:04:00.000-03:00

Creating learners' awareness to cultural aspects is a two edge sword. It is also important to make students understand that their own cultural traditions may cause awe in some foreign people. This is the case for people who live in Southern Brazil and have the habit of drinking mate. Stories are told all the time about Gauchos - the specific name of the natives of the region - arriving in airports overseas with a bag or two of a herb that resembles very much marijuana. Visitors are always curious about the drink, so I am transcribing an essay by an intermediate student that writes about the subject. He is exercising for the next time he meets up with a foreign visitor here in this area.

Mate
by M.L.

I will tell you about the most tradicional culture in Rio Grande do Sul, a state of Brazil. Anywhere you are, for example walking in the park, in a meeting, football stadium, friend's house, so on, you will see some people sitting in a circle drinking something using a type of pine cone. It's name here is "chimarrao" or mate. This beverage is made using brasilian green tea with hot water and you drink it using a metal straw. Finally, I already advise you to never say no when someone invites you to participate of a "chimarrao" round. You will be rude. And remember, you drink it until you finish all the water in the pine cone. You will know that when you hear the sound glu...glu...glu.

Starting from scratch

2006-07-18T10:37:00.000-03:00

A small group of students recently enquired about starting Basic A classes. We did in fact have a couple of meetings, until it turned out that they were assigned to take a professional development course. This was the fastest ending group I´ve had.

Nevertheless, something interesting came up a long the small period. I told them how the process develops and that they should create the habit of coming to classes and doing their homework. Other than that they should forget they are starting a new project. The reason of my orientation was that experience shows that students tend to get anxious during the Basic period, and end up giving it up all together. They look ahead and see an enormous effort ahead of them which they feel will be too much of a load to carry.

This led me to incorporate this orientation to every Basic group that I start from now on.

NOTE:
I feel confortable to say I've mastered the Basic and Intermediate processsess. Currently, I'm more concerned with Advanced learners' needs and how to enhance their experience and make the progress faster and more effective. However, there is something to keep in mind when dealing with Advanced students. They tend to be very overconfident and mistakenly professionally confortable with their skills. This has led me to believe that creating situations outside of the business theater is one important solution to developing their interest in the language.

Outline of Presentation at SBS/P.A. 12/05/2006

2006-05-21T16:16:00.000-03:00

On the date above I made a presentation about Business English, which I am now posting its outline.

Teaching Business English
A Professional Competitive Advantage
At your Reach

Contents

INTRODUCTION
What matters is the outcome
Effective communication between teacher and student
A pragmatic approach: a play of words
A competitive edge
FIRST PART (An overview of the B.E. environment)
1- Local Companies X International Companies
· Open and closed companies (reflexive, more complex information systems demanding different professional profiles; high level management X family owned, intuitive, self-centered, however, sometimes more intimate)
· Different areas: chemical, food, automotive, retail, etc.
· Different departments;
· Nationalities: American, European, Asian, Latin American
· Management styles
2- Dos and don'ts of B.E.: what is true and what is not
· 10 blind men and the elephant;
· Business Experience X Teaching Training
· Own terminology: (Homework – follow-up, Deadlines, session – class, aims and targets)
· Soft skills
· Collateral learning
· Teacher as agent of social changes

. The Financial Times and The Economist - you're better off reading Time and Newsweek
3- Companies’ and learners’ realities – needs analysis
· Perfection X Excellence (constant self improvement)
· Immediate results;
· Long-term investment;
· Sometimes fine tuning is necessary; preparation for trips;
· Motivation: Integrative X Intructional
4- B.E. is not just vocabulary: accuracy in L2 output X accuracy in effective communication
· Awareness not to jeopardize communication;
· Cultural awareness;
· Discovery Channel and National Geographic, BBC and CNN
5- Getting started: marketing, professionalism and commitment are the elements of survival
· B.E. as a competitive edge : My humble story
· TOEIC as a differential factor
6- Dress code, body language and persuasion
· Banks and Financial Institutions;
· Clothes and office furniture;

SECOND PART – The English teaching Experience
1- Individual differences and L2 aptitude of business people – personal insights
· Aptitude/Intelligence and Mental Models;
· Discipline is a defining factor (motivation and attitude);
2- Methodologies and Instructional Design
· A brief history of B.E.;
· The Asian market and the teaching material today;
· The importance of variety and diversity;
· Speed;
· Material demands and creativity;
· Intercultural awareness
· Allow them to talk about their jobs (preferably everyday);
· Encouraged simulated presentations – at all levels – and let them teach you about their work
· Material for explicit grammar teaching with drills;
3- Explicit grammar teaching and the development of learners’ autonomy
· The dictionary and grammar strategy works;
· Special attention in B.E. context;
4- Syllabus
· Grammar – Murphy English in use;
· Vocabulary – GSL List (Globish);
· Needs analysis;
5- The problem of Flow
· First learn to identify;
· Then learn to induce;
6- Managing self expectancies and over confidence
· Opening a new window for your students;

7- The exercise of Pragmatism

THIRD PART – A Hands on Attitude
1- Classroom routines: be a manager and identify the class leader
· Planning;
· Class activities;
· Assessment;
· Money matters;
· Schedules (transfers/cancellations);
· Priority x Urgency;
· The student in the 1st place;
· Keep aces up your sleeve all the time;

. Truth of the moment (What?)
2- Complementing your workday with ESP in hotels, restaurants, hospitals, etc.
· Entrepreneur traits;
· Sales pitch and PowerPoint presentations;
· Teaching material;
3- Commented readings and crash course suggestions for B.E. Teachers - developing soft skills
· An overview of leadership styles:
o 60s and before - Cutthroat capitalism X principles
o 70s military reference
o 80s artistic sensitivity
o 90s psychological approach
o 2000 servant leadership
· Parallel with the development of Administration and Technologies;
· The BBC World Business Report;

BOOK REVIEW*:
· The Fifth Discipline (1994), Peter Senge

· Essential Drucker (in one volume) The best of (2003)

· Re-imagine! ( 2006), Tom Peters

· What is Management (2002), Joan Magretta

· The Seven Habits of the Highly Effective People (2004), and 8th Habit (2005), Stephen Covey

. The Servant (1998), James Hunter

Also try biographies, e.g., Jack Welch, Walt Disney, Sam Walton, Michael Dell, etc.

Keep an eye out for up to 30 hour extention courses at local colleges in the areas of Human Resources, Marketing and Sales, and Management. Also check local Chambers of Commerce, Retailer Organizations, and Industry Federations. Ask for help at Junior Achievement Programs, Local Administration Colleges, and local guilds and worker unions. Do not loose time with Finance, Logistics, Accounting, and Information Technology - these are very specialized areas and will not give the basis you need. Motivational lectures are not very recommended. In fact be very careful with this. The Seven Habits, above, should cover all your needs, and the 8th comes with a wonderful DVD that you can even work in class - this is very highly recommended literature and should not be taken for granted. My suggestion is that if you venture into self-help literature, be very careful and keep a high critical standing.

FOURTH PART – An Outlook of what we are facing
1- Domestic and International Outlook: Globalization has reached a point of no return and English is its lingua franca.
· Knocking down tariff barriers – Free Trade
· Descartes: Good sense is something everyone thinks they have enough of;
· Future trends
o More school Instruction
o Learning Abroad
o B.E. Specialization

°Internal Language Standardization Management

CONCLUSION

Cultivating the wish to play a decisive role in other people's professional lives, while learning and growing with them, is what B.E. is all about. Keep an open minded attitude all the time. And, think about these four points of view which I think are very cool:

If ideas are not determined by history, the inventions are: and the inventions are determined by ideas. Will Durant - Phylosopher
[...] This corporate world helps to define what we are, while we - through our feedback and support - help to define that which it becomes. Howard Rothman Journalist
It is the foremost task - and responsibility - of our generation to re-imagine our enterprises and institutions, public and private. Tom Peters - Business Consultant

This last one is especially addressed to people involved in B.E.

[the typewriter, the DC-3, etc.] show the degree to which powerful competitors not only resist innovative threats, but actually resist all efforts to understand them, preferring to further entrench their position in the older products. Jim Utterback - MIT Professor

Motivation

2006-04-24T18:43:00.000-03:00

One of the students in my pre-intermediate class had a special training course today, so I decided to only talk to the others and not introduce any new material - we are using Oxford's Business Venture 1 material.

First I emphasized the importance of them studying in their grammar - Cambridge's Grammar in Use by Murphy. This is a way of directing them to what is called Learner's Autonomy. It makes them more responsible for their own attainment. After that, we talked about motivation. The girl that was missing has company backing for her classes and the others don't. They immediately recognized that she is more motivated because she feels that the company is investing on her English skills. Anyway, we went on talking about how many people stop their studies in Basic or Pre-Intermediate and then go back, stop, go back... and it seems it never ends - reason for why they get so frustrated. I have been working with these guys since Basic A and I've accomplished one of my most difficult goals, which has been to create awareness and motivation so that they don't fall into that category.

Motivating students and managing their stress and frustrations is a great part of my job. The most important part of this task, I guess, is to make them realize that learning and using a language is a long-term investment. I always tell them that they will actually "feel" this when they start reaching a certain amount of fluency - some 150 hours of total training, more or less (these students have had more or less 70 hours so far).

The Business Venture 1 is now available with a TOEIC simulation - equivalent to a TOEIC Bridge. However, I only begin using this test when they finish the book.

When I talk about a certain amount of fluency, this corresponds to a score of approximately 120-140 in a TOEIC Bridge or the Business Venture simulation (an achievement of around 70% of the test). Usually, once they have reached this level of proficiency, they will be motivated, or at least begin to see some true results and really begin to use the language. Having newcomers reach this stage of learning is probably the most difficult part of any English teacher's job, and motivation is the key word in achieving this.

In the future I will mention some things about proficiency levels, time expectancy, and TOEIC and TOEIC Bridge, since I do use them regularly as assessment tools in my work.

Bulletin Board/Curiosity-Reading Corner

2006-04-18T10:46:00.000-03:00

When NASA first started sending up astronauts, they quickly discovered the ballpoint pens would not work in zero gravity. To combat the problem, NASA scientists spent a decade and $12 Billion to develop a pen that writes in zero gravity, upside down, underwater, on almost any surface including glass and at temperatures ranging from below freezing to 300C.

The Russians used a pencil.

This is a marvelous story to illustrate the perils of government waste; pity it's not true. NASA didn't have $12 billion to spend on anything when it first started sending astronauts into space in the early 1960s. The agency's entire budget for the 1960 was $500 million; by 1965, it was up to $5.2 billion, still not enough to throw billions away reinventing the ballpoint pen.

During the first NASA missions the astronauts used pencils. For Project Gemini, for example, NASA ordered mechanical pencils in 1965 from Tycam Engineering Manufacturing, Inc., in Houston. The fixed price contract purchased 34 units at a total cost of $4,382.50, or $128.89 per unit. That created something of a controversy at the time, as many people believed it was a frivolous expense. NASA backtracked immediately and equipped the astronauts with less costly items

Be that as it may, astronauts in the Apollo program did begin using a specially-designed zero-gravity pen in 1968 called the Fisher AG-7 Space Pen. Nitrogen-pressurized, the pen worked in "freezing cold, desert heat, underwater and upside down," as well as the weightlessness of outer space. It was developed not by NASA but by an enterprising individual, Paul C. Fisher, owner of the Fisher Space Pen Company. By his own account, Fisher spent "thousands of hours and millions of dollars" of his own in research and development; not billions. The company reportedly invested about $1 million of its own funds in the effort then patented its product and cornered the market as a result.

Fisher offered the pens to NASA in 1965, but, because of the earlier controversy, the agency was hesitant in its approach. In 1967, after rigorous tests, NASA managers agreed to equip the Apollo astronauts with these pens. Media reports indicate that approximately 400 pens were purchased from Fisher at $6 per unit for Project Apollo.

The Soviet Union also purchased 100 of the Fisher pens, and 1,000 ink cartridges, in February 1969, for use on its Soyuz space flights. Previously, its cosmonauts had been using grease pencils to write in orbit.

Both American astronauts and Soviet/Russian cosmonauts have continued to use these pens.
Fisher continues to market his space pens as the writing instrument that went to the Moon and has spun off this effort into a separate corporation, the Fisher Space Pen Co.

The Fisher Space Pen is still used by both American and Russian astronauts on every space flight, and you can buy one yourself direct from the company for a measly 50 bucks.

The Fisher Pens are displayed at the New York Museum of Art and the Smithsonian!

http://www.fisherpen.com/

The Scope of Language

2006-04-14T12:35:00.000-03:00

It is not my aim to comment frequently on very technical issues in this blog. However, yesterday in the evening, at a company I work with, I was approached by a programmer that knew I was an English Teacher. His dilemma was that after learning several computer languages he was unable to visualize the whole scope of the English language - it's architecture. Fortunately I was able to explain to him that language is made up of three dimensions, which are:

Meaning, or what I am communication
Form, or how I am communicating
Use, or in what situation this is occurring

Grammar is part of Form and can be understood as:

Verb Tenses
Structures
Function words
Vocabulary
Syntax

Being a programmer it may be difficult for him to conceive that language is a non-linear system. In fact, many students have the belief that there is some kind of “order” in the way to learn a language. However, there is no evidence today that, for example, Present Tense should be learned before Past Tense of vice-versa. In terms of how this is processed in the brain, today it is believed that language acquisition and use involve four neuro- functionally cerebral mechanisms*:

Implicit competence, or using the correct form not exactly knowing why – practice;
Metalinguistic knowledge, or being able to identify the correct technical term, its definition, etc., for an occurrence, word, etc – what is an adverb;
Pragmatics, or using the language in situations that may even be influenced by cultural aspects - Do you want to play soccer? - It's rainning; and
Motivation, or how important it is to the learner to learn.

*Each of these is made up of several neurofunctional modules – i.e. aural, oral, visual, gestual - and that also subserve each other.

Clearly this student’s frustration was showing that he was motivated. Just because he chose this learning strategy to solve his problem does not mean it is wrong. Each individual develops his/her personal learning strategy. For me, it was the first time I had ever seen one as such. Just the same, how well a strategy works can only be assessed through the learner's explicit and implicit achievements.

Job Description

2006-04-13T15:29:00.000-03:00

This morning I was working with a student on an exercise about job descriptions and when we finished he surprized me by asking what I liked and disliked about my job. Here is my answer:

Like - Seeing the result of my work. When I catch someone who has been my student since Basic A, for example, talking on the phone or receiving a foreigner. Or when I receive a positive feedback about how a meeting or conference call was successfully accomplished in English.
Dislike - All of the class cancelations and transfers, and that my schedule never lasts more than two months. I'm constantly arranging my diary, negotiating with students to fit someone in where someone else is already having classes. Due to the confusion I confess that I've misscheduled some classes in the past. Sometimes leaving students waiting or arriving and having no one there for class.

Introduction

2006-04-13T14:30:00.000-03:00

It is a pleasure to start this communication with readers, teachers, and others interested in developing their English competences focused on business. I hope that our interaction contributes to our professional growth.

2006-04-06T14:13:00.000-03:00

Editora Campus/Elsevier