Business is ready for the right skills | Education | Guardian Weekly - 0 views
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We are not experts on how to give an effective presentation, lead a successful meeting or network at conferences.
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Terms such as meetings, presentations, telephoning, socialising and negotiating help to define what business people need to do in English.
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Successful businesses people are multi-taskers and multi-skilled. They don't walk into a presentation and only "present". They also socialise with audience members beforehand and write emails to follow up contacts afterwards.
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Students also seem familiar with them and more readily respond to a lesson aimed at teaching the language for something practical like how to "socialise at dinner" than distinguishing between the past simple and present perfect
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Comfort sees many of the old skills as channels we use to communicate rather than as skills on their own. So while the channel might be a conversation via an online webcam, he says "skills such as 'active listening', 'exposing your intention', 'influencing' are the underlying skills that support all communication.
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Giving feedback or providing the tools for learners to assess their own performance, for example by videoing a student, is part of this process. With groups we can encourage peer feedback and allow classrooms to become forums to discuss what is effective behaviour or successful communication
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In the past teachers perceived that they were expected to comment on issues such as the quality of the learner's visual aids or meaningful body language. As a result, some embraced the opportunity to switch from language teacher to paralinguistic guru (with varying results) but the majority shied away from communication skills.