Insurance is a huge and rapidly internationalising industry that needs more and more English instruction. This article gives some ideas on giving such students and group classes the lessons that they need.
What students in insurance need to know
Although you could quite easily design a course on English for underwriters, English for claims adjusters, etc, the vast majority of students will do those things only in L1 and/ or will understand that specialist vocabulary much better than the teacher does. As insurance companies have become more and more international, my students are much more likely to communicate in English with an international colleague such as a boss, subordinate, team member, business partner, someone in head office, or someone in a subsidiary. Such communications tend to have quite big topics like trends in insurance (related to climate change, ageing population, etc) and coming up with new products, topics that can also come up in international conferences. There also tends to be a few students who need to communicate with clients in English and so need to be able to explain insurance topics in simple language, and a few new recruits and people in HR etc whose jobs are not closely linked to actual insurance who need such things explained to them to understand more about their company.
These real-life needs for English in the insurance industry are good news as:
- it makes it possible to adapt general materials on meetings, emailing, etc by adding some insurance vocabulary and topics
- big topics like AI in insurance are interesting to discuss even for non-specialists and easy to find articles etc on
- it’s okay to have a class which includes students with quite different job titles (which is often the case)
- it’s perfectly possible for non-specialist teachers to teach students from the insurance industry
General business topics which are worth spending (extra) time on in classes in this industry include:
- pronouncing numbers
- explaining products
- checking/ clarifying
- comparing and contrasting
- negotiating
- giving bad news
- active listening such as expressing sympathy
- explaining processes such as what steps a corporate customer’s policy has to go through
Topics which should be interesting to discuss and possible to find interesting content on include:
- insurance scandals, such as illegal sales tactics and wrongly rejected claims
- international M&A in insurance companies
- the history of insurance/ big historical insurance companies
- amazing facts about insurance (how much celebrities’ body parts were insured for, etc)
- health insurance in different countries
- natural disasters
- risk (how risky certain activities are, etc)
- accidents (what the biggest dangers are in the home, etc)
- small print
- health and safety (RSI, etc)
- lifestyles (stress, lifestyle diseases, etc)
- ageing populations
As well as such topic-based and discussion-based lessons, there are some ideas below on more structured activities such as games.
Insurance vocabulary definitions game/ guessing game
Students choose a term like “agent” or “reinsurance” from a list and describe it without saying its name until someone else guesses which one they chose. They can then discuss how good the description was.
Perhaps after this game, the same list can also be used to practise asking for and giving clarification, for example as a roleplay with someone playing a customer with no knowledge of insurance.
Insurance trends speaking activities
My students quite often receive English memos on and sometimes have to discuss changes in the insurance industry such as the recovery of travel insurance and the growth of AI, so benefit from some practice of “accelerate”, “flatten out”, etc. If you give them a list of suitable topics like “market share of the biggest companies”, activities include:
- describing a trend and seeing if everyone else agrees
- drawing a graph of one, dictating it to someone else to draw without showing it, comparing drawings, then discussing how realistic it is
- describing one trend without saying the topic for their partner to guess
Insurance problem roleplays
Roleplays on insurance topics can be made more interesting and good preparation for difficult situations by adding issues like:
- the other person knows nothing about insurance and so everything needs to be explained
- the other person is googling everything you say and thinks they can get a better deal online
- you can’t remember much about the incident that you want to claim for
- you want to renegotiate your insurance
- what they want to claim for isn’t covered in their insurance, but they are a big client who you don’t want to lose
- your market share in your product has been declining, but it is not your fault
- the new product idea that you are presenting to the board turns out to be something that they have already considered, so you need to quickly think of original variations
Insurance numbers warmer cooler
Find interesting insurance stats such as the size of the worldwide farm insurance market, how many people have particular insurance roles in the world, and what year certain natural disasters happened, then split those numbers between at least two worksheets. Students turn those stats into questions like “How many life insurance companies are there in this country?” and give hints like “Far higher” and “Slightly lower” until their partner gets exactly the right number.
Opinions on insurance topics speaking
If you give students topics that they might have opinions about like “buying insurance from a website” and “graduate recruits vs mid-career candidates”, these can be made more interesting by:
- having to talk about a topic chosen at random (from a numbered list, with a dice, from a pack of cards, etc)
- starting with opposite points of viewing then trying to reach agreement
- deciding if they will give their own real opinion or the opposite point of view (perhaps by flipping a coin)
Insurance board games
There are two kinds of board game that could work with this topic:
- a board which progresses through the steps of a process, e.g. the first square being considering insurance to the last square being successfully making a claim
- a board which has useful things for students to speak about in each square.
In both cases students can progress around the board with a dice. However, it is more useful for their partners to judge them on how long they spoke, how well they dealt with the situations, etc, and give them points between one and six. They then move on that many squares.