June 2004 Archives

The quality of Business English sites varies enormously, from the woeful to the highly professional, though most of the latter are sites offering courses. When it comes to materials online, the situation is not perticularly good. As with many areas of ESP (English for Special Purposes), there are many cases where the materials have been designed by ESL teachers and materials makers with no specialised knowledge of the area. When ESL Business English materials first started being developed, many suffered from only having a superficial gloss of their subject; they practised virtually the same things, with a sprinkling of words related to the subject. With use of authentic texts and a growing knowledge of the subject, things have changed and improved considerably.

It strikes me as very strange that the global language teaching community has not made use of the potential of computers and the Internet. I am continually amazed that so few examples of really good, well thought out language tools and applications actually exist. Sure, you have a number of very good teaching and learning aids out there to choose from, but they all seem to be using essentially the same old methodology.

Recently, there was an incident where a British sports commentator made a racist comment and swore, believing he was off-air. It was reported in the press three ways; without mentioning the offending words (one racist, one obscene); using asterixes to replace letter; or by printing the words.