There are widely different approaches to grammar in business English and English for Specific Purposes classes, all the way from no grammar at all to the same amount as in general English classes. This article reviews the different possibilities for how much and what grammar to teach, then looks at how to do so.
Deciding on the right amount of grammar in business and ESP classes
Reasons for teaching (some or more) grammar in business and ESP classes include:
- grammar being reassuring revision for students who are struggling with the subject-specific parts of the course, for example for students who haven’t done that job yet or have just started it
- grammar being a way of presenting useful phrases, e.g. using meetings phrases with the prepositions taken out as both grammar practice and functional language presentation
- some students needing extra accuracy because mistakes can have a negative impact in their jobs (when they have to give presentations, when they have to write reports, etc)
- grammar as necessary language to do common business tasks, such as Present Perfect being needed for checking progress (“Have you… yet?”, etc)
Possible arguments against teaching (so much or any) grammar in business and ESP lessons include:
- students already knowing more about and/ or focusing more on grammar than more important things like functional language
- students already focusing too much on accuracy and so not concentrating enough on communication
- students expecting a business/ ESP course that isn’t so similar to their past English language education
Most of the factors above vary from student to student, so some students might need grammar added to a syllabus that only has business topics, while others might benefit more if most of the grammar pages of their business textbooks are skipped, at least until the need for those points are made clear through communication difficulties.
What grammar to teach in business/ ESP classes
The grammar points that my business and ESP students most often need for effective communication are, in approximate order of usefulness/ importance:
- a range of future tenses to talk about future meetings and other arrangements, future plans, forecasts/ predictions, etc (“I’m sorry, at that time I’m meeting…”, “I reckon it will probably be popular with…”, etc)
- past, present and future time expressions (“the day after tomorrow”, “once every two weeks”, “by the end of this week”, etc)
- modal verbs to talk about rules, to talk about possibilities, to ask for permission, etc (“All employees must…”, “It could possibly suffer from…”, “Could I possibly…?”, etc)
- comparing and contrasting language (“not as… as”, “far more effective than”, “On the other hand”, etc)
- Present Perfect to check and report on progress (“I have finished half of… but I haven’t started… yet”, etc)
- conditionals to talk about possible plans, negotiate, etc (“If we cut the price by 50%, that would get a lot of free publicity”, etc)
- passive voice (“It has been produced here since 1937”, “It was founded in Switzerland just a few years ago”, etc)
There are also other grammar points such as articles, dependent prepositions and irregular past verbs which are not usually important for clear communication, but can really stand out in writing as being clumsy and even lazy. These kinds of points are therefore worth at least correcting in students’ homework emails, reports, etc. There are then things like present tenses which are overtaught and rarely used in a typical day of English communication. These don’t necessarily have to be skipped if they are in the syllabus, just as long as you can use those grammar points as a way of introducing useful phrases. For example, Present Continuous is mainly useful as a way to teach phrases like “Just a moment, I’m just writing that down”.
How to present grammar in business/ ESP classes
The method for presenting grammar that most matches most of the situations described above is to:
- first set up a communicative situation such as students pretending to email each other to arrange a meeting
- see which language causes communication problems, could cause communication problems, or at least could be very distracting for the other person
- think about which of those language points is most likely to be a problem in real-life and is teachable with that class of students (due to class time, their English level, etc)
- (next, or in a future lesson) present the language through error correction, eliciting better phrases that students could have used in the communication, etc
- set up semi-free practice of the language through another communicative situation, perhaps similar to the initial situation if that is sufficiently realistic and important for those students
If you’ve already decided you want to present and practise a particular point such as Present Perfect, you should be able to justify that with a task where they will need the language but might not be able to use it initially (well or at all). However, you should have a plan B ready in case they can use the language well enough in the first stage and so it is impossible to justify more work on it.
Other possible ways of presenting grammar in business/ ESP classes include:
- give students a text on a business/ ESP topic that has the target language in it and comprehension questions, perhaps after discussing the same topics themselves (e.g. a text with future predictions of one particular industry after making predictions on their own industries, to check the information in then search for relevant grammar)
- give students some business communication such as an email exchange or a dialogue of two people meeting for the first time, discuss aspects of the communication such as how well they communicated and/ or cultural differences, then look at the language used in it