Essex Business School Southend Group

I've uploaded two files that I promised you in the last 24 hours. Clicking here will give you the powerpoint file from Monday's project class, while clicking here will give you the ppt from today's ESP class - complete with audio recordings (you just have to click on the sound icon). Let me know if you have any problems downloading or opening these.

Resources for Business Studies Students

My student Muhammad and I found this very useful online resource for business studies vocabulary - The Finanical Times Lexicon. He's going to use it to make personalised glossaries for his notes, which I think will be useful We also looked at a pitch from Dragon's Den on Youtube. Plenty more are available, but this is a nice ten-minute example of what you find in the programme.

The Business Cycle

Thanks again to Matt, Elsa, and Am for their introduction to today's topic. If you'd like to read the Observer feature in full online you can find it here with the sector by sector guide here.

I promised you some questions...I hope you can provide me with some answers. Post your ideas as comments please...

1. Is now a good time to sell my flat?

2. Is unemployment likely to fall soon?

3. How easy should it be for me to borrow money from a British bank now?

4. Are any countries showing signs of a faster recovery than the UK?

5. What can or should the government be doing to speed up the recovery?

Marketing

Apologies for the audio disaster in today's class. If you want to listen to Steve Moody properly you can download the audio file here. Meanwhile, here's the powerpoint presentation from MY part of the lesson. Perhaps if Saki, Steve, and Aiko send me theirs I can make that available too. Or we could just cheat (like they did) and do "their" marketing quiz online here.

EBS: Venture Capital and Entrepreneurs

The powerpoint presentation from today's class is available to download here. In class we listened to these two audio files - 1C and 1D - and I've uploaded a third for you here.

If you follow this link you can watch the whole of the episode of Dragon's Den that we looked at in class. From this page you can also view every episode of the current series.

Finally, if you want to think ahead to the pitches you're going to hear on Friday, you can view pictures of your innovative products here and download the preparation worksheet here.

International Trade

You can download the powerpoint presentation from today's class here, along with audio files of the listening task which can be found at the end of unit 27 (parts one and two).

A selection of articles on International Trade can be found here on the Financial Times website.

Extra reading and listening

As a follow-up to this afternoon's lecture, I thought I'd post links to the online versions of the publications that were mentioned -The Financial Times and The Economist. I know most of you already know how to listen to Radio 4 online, but at this stage of your language learning, it may be better for you to download podcasts than to try to listen live. Podcasts are portable and allow you to listen to short segments of radio over and over, thus giving you more chance to understand what you here. Click here to visit a page full of links to Radio 4 podcasts. You may be particularly intrested in Newspod, Peter Day's World of Business, and the Weekly Political Review.

English for Business Studies

A couple of powerpoint files for you from the last two EBS classes:
EBS 5 on Production and EBS 4 on Recruitment

M&S Management and other issues

There are sound files from Monday's English for Business Studies lesson available (parts one, two, and three) but they contain less nudity than this video clip:

English for Business Studies : Syllabus Planning

Here is the Powerpoint presentation we used in class with your choice of topics that we'll study in this course.

CV Writing : Step One

Today we looked at some language for making yourself sound dynamic on a CV.

First we considered a list skills and qualities featured in a textbook called Business Builder. The first task was for students to identify which skills and qualities they have and then to prove it by referring to examples of achievements in their work experience, education, and personal life.

We then looked at the language they used to express them and worked on ways of making it more dynamic. We also used this vocabulary exercise to identify accurate and effective collocations to talk about work experience. A Word file can be downloaded here.

Language for Presentations

If you're interested, you can look at this collocations exercise related to presentations. Cover the verbs and then try to remember whether each phrase needs MAKE, DO, GIVE, or TAKE to complete it. There is also a handout with useful phrases for opening a presentation here.

A Marketing Project

Four products with potential image problems. We considered their strengths and weaknesses and then came up with a strategy for marketing them through this task. Feedback from the resulting presentations is here.

Advertising Campaigns

We looked at these advertising campaigns and discussed the feasibility of each one. One the same handout we did a branding task courtesy of Lexicon Naming via In Company. Finally we looked at advertising slogans. If you have some free time, why not try this stupid but entertaining random advert generator.

Memos and e-mails

Writing short but effective messages is a true art form. An analysis of these examples followed by some practice will help you take the first steps to perfecting this art form!

Negotiations

The idea was to use some of this useful language for negotiations in a negotiation roleplay about buying and selling digital cameras. A breakdown of the class results is here.

Writing a CV

The class handout for improving on your CV is here.

Coffee Machine Conversations

What's the difference between English and English for Work? In some ways, nothing, but we sometimes have to use English skills to get what we want (or need) at work. We used a conversation at a coffee machine as a frame in which to try to find out vital information about work-related issues. Feeback on the language used in class conversations can be found here, while some examples of wonderful phrases students used and an exercise in reducing the amount of over-formal grammar that gets used are all here.

English for Work

You can access handouts from the course here - just click on English for Work and you should be able to see everything. You can also access files individually from the following links:

Advertising slogan exercise and key.

E-mail task and follow-up roleplay.

Useful language for meetings.

Useful language for presentations.