This course is designed for advanced ESL students who wish to improve their business communication skills. Through a set of interrelated units, students’ practice speaking, listening, reading and writing in a variety of common formal and informal situations commensurate with today’s standard business models.
Students’ learn day-to-day skills such as handling telephone calls, negotiating, networking, managing meetings, interviewing, and socializing in a business environment; as well as the ability to evaluate their own writing, thus equipping them to write and edit correspondence with the aim of producing effective business memos, letters, e-mails, informal and formal reports and presentation materials.
| Units |
Skills |
Language Work |
Additional Information |
| 1. Communication |
Dealing with communication problems; e-mails, telephone calls, letters of complaint |
- Vocabulary & Idioms
- Asking for clarification, summarizing a phone call
|
|
| 2. International Marketing |
- Brainstorming
- Marketing Mix
- Adapting to global markets
|
- Marketing collocations;
- Noun compounds and noun phrases
|
Group Presentation:Â New brand to the international market |
| 3. Building Relationships |
- Networking
- Making choices, explaining reasons
|
- Words and collocations to describe relations;
- Phrasal verbs
|
Individual assignment:Â The Art of Small Talk
Pair Work:
Creating a ‘text’ for networking |
| 4. Success |
- Negotiating
- Comparing and contrasting different modals of success
|
Present and past tenses;
Prefixes |
Individual presentation:
Comparing companies successes and failures
|
| 5. Job Satisfaction |
- Handling difficult situations
- Human Resources
|
Passives
Vocabulary for describing motivation factors |
Group Work:
Create company newsletter |
| 6. Risk |
Reaching agreement |
Adverbs of degree |
|
| 7. e-commerce |
Presentation of numbers and graphs |
- Conditionals
- Internet terms
|
Pair Work:
Create a product based website |
| 8. Team Building |
Resolving Conflict |
|
Individual presentation:Â Personal management style |
| 9. Raising Finance |
- Negotiating
- Analyzing data
- Presenting numeric information
|
- Idiomatic language about money
- Dependent prepositions
|
Individual assignment:Â Stock Market Investing |
| 10. Customer Service |
- Active Listening in the context of customer service
- Dealing with customer complaints
|
- Gerunds
- Handling complaints
|
Pair work presentation:
Create, distribute and analyze customer service survey |
| 11. Crisis Management |
Asking and answering difficult questions |
- Nouns phrases with and without ‘of’
- Language of contrasting and adding additional information
|
Class Assignment:
Crisis management team deals with mock crisis, press releases, press conference, action plan and follow-up report |
| 12. Takeovers and Mergers |
- Analyzing of information for making acquisitions
- Summarizing
|
- Words and expressions relating to takeovers and mergers
- Newspaper headlines
|
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Advanced Business - Curriculum