Teaching grammar in esp classroom (in technical colleges) Introduction

Business English

Business English is probably one of the most needed and spread program of ESP. When it comes to books and materials, this part of ESP has a lot to offer. Top world publishers like Oxford University Press, Cambridge Press and Pearson offer variety of books particularly for Business English. Such examples are Business Result and ProFile. Initially, if learners of Business English should be introduced with present simple tense, it could start with asking them to describe their routines, whether daily weekly or monthly. Then they could be triggered to use words related to their field, such as meetings, CEO, secretary, documents even further professional vocabulary.
As there are many materials for Business English, it is just a matter of the curricula or the choice of the teacher which materials will be used in class. The following image is cropped from a booklet published by Cambridge, which is meant for Professional use.
I t is a simple exercise about tenses in some sentences which are related to work and business. This is very easy for a teacher who doesn’t have a lot of time to prepare for the class. But, it is not the most attractive way to teach a grammar lesson. In order to have some more interesting activities in class, students could watch a short video of daily routine of a businessman, or a successful person. This would be a practice for their ears with a professional vocabulary and undoubtedly basic use of the tense they are expected to learn. Then, learners could be told that the lesson is about the specific tense and write on the table few of the sentences mentioned in the video. Those sentences are explained and more importance is given to main characteristics of the tense that they should remember. Through the video, learners are not only indirectly introduced the lesson of the day, but they are one step closer to remembering what they have heard because of being digital presentation.

The image above is a screenshot from a motivational video about entrepreneurs. Many sentences are structured in present simple and also displayed in the screen besides being heard. This could be a very attractive and motivational way to use it in a grammar class of ESP learning. There is no better way how to grasp the attention of the learners through a video which is closely related to their future job. The initial sentence “What does it mean to be an entrepreneur” is itself written using present simple, and it could be further used to explain the characteristic of the changes in the third person singular. Another sentence used is “Only rare human beings have these qualities”, and this, besides being motivational is easy to remember and learners register the use of have for plural, in this case the noun of “beings”. For more, students can be asked to watch the video again and take notes of verbs that are in present and present them after watching the video for the first time. They could also be assigned homework to find similar videos online, and write few sentences about those videos using present simple, and present those in the upcoming class. In that way they are not directly engaged in boring grammar exercises, but finding grammar elements in materials related to their current job (if they are employed) or their future career (if they are students). It is obvious that there is a difference between these two types of presenting a specific material in front of the learners. The second one which includes the video requires more time to find it and relate to a grammar lesson. Busy teachers find it harder to prepare these extra materials, but when there are good results at the end of the assessment everything is worth the time and effort put in doing something.