Peter O’Neill is a teacher and the language coordinator at EM Normandie Business School, Dublin campus, where he has been working for the last couple of years. He is also a published author, see Henry Street Arcade, a bilingual collection of poetry with translations into French by Yan Kouton, Éditions du Pont de l’Europe, 2021.  His first novel, The Fetishist, will be published in Berlin next year. 
 

For the last two years or so, I have been teaching English to French Business English students here in a French Business English school which has been a very rich teaching experience and that has forced me to reconsider teaching English from a very different context to that of the practice of teaching in a more standard or traditional school where generally you would find yourself in a multi-lingual and so multi-cultural context. What is the big take behind all of this, I hear you ask? 

Well, first of all, emphatic stress! Stress of all kinds, really, but most importantly emphatic stress, particularly when you are trying to teach a class a proper Business English lexicon which they will then have to activate, typically over the course of one semester, in an end of term exam and any number of continuous assessments on the ongoing basis. 

Of course, the main issue for the students is that they are living in linguistic bubble, a French bubble, and in order to pierce it I have relearned that the major difference between the French language, indeed all Romance languages, and English is the very particular stress patterns involved in both; French is vowel centred, so in this way all words carry equal stress, in a way while English only the content words, typically verbs, nouns and adjectives and adverbs are highlighted.

It is a very good idea to ground the students, very early on I find, in the physical rather than the mental, efforts involved in practicing the language. This is what I mean Being in Language! I am of course referencing Heidegger, without a doubt a major core influence for me as a teacher of English for over two decades. I majored in philosophy under the tutelage of one of the foremost experts in Ireland on Heidegger, Cyril McDonnell ( Heidegger’s Way Through Phenomenology to the Question of the Meaning of Being: A Study of Heidegger’s Philosophical Path of Thinking from 1909 to 1927, 2015.), so Heidegger’s thoughts on language have remained with me as an essential reference into language and the importance of language, and particularly in relation to human identity, as a very critical tool of human communication, in general, but also particularly useful as a bank of knowledge, or resource pool, to dip back into in order to remain permanently relevant as an effective teacher of language, and in a very practical way too. 

Heidegger was obsessed with Being, both the verb and the noun form. Let us first concern ourselves with the gerund form here, as it is the most Heideggerian notion, but also the most practical too when you are trying to get the students to understand the critical importance of emphatic stress in terms of developing an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ rhythm, which I always equate with Rock and Roll, as opposed to the very serpentine dance of the vowel stressed undulating cadence and rhythms of the language of the poets Jules Laforgue and Charles Baudelaire.

Speaking more plainly, when we are going over the gap filling exercises of the TOEIC reading paper, questions 101 – 130, after first getting them to identify and highlight the content words, which must be stressed, I then find it very useful for them to read the question aloud stressing the words appropriately and in an attempt to further aid them I resorted to a rather rudimentary but rather effective method of colour coding ( see diagram below). 

Once you start using the new software, you will be able to do the work much more easily.

The director asked us to have the report completed by 5:00 today at the latest.

Since they came to us with such an attractive offer, signing the contract was an easy decision.

( Practice Tests for the TEOIC Test, 4 Complete Tests, Collins English for Exams, 2019.)

As simple as it might appear, I have noticed a marked improvement in the pronunciation patterns of the students, and also, it is a wonderfully physical way of getting them to engage with the language in a very real and fundamental way, and which they can see an immediate result of their spoken English. 

Of course, you want to recycle the target language as much as possible, so I find that getting them to activate the very specific collocations in the context of a formal Business English discussion is a wonderful way to get them to harness the newfound language. I typically get them to try to write a long simple complex sentence, typically involving ( a) a defining relative clause, ( b) multiple conjunctive clauses, at least 2 and, if at all possible, 3. Give them around ten minutes to do this, and then ask each of them a particular questions which will illicit an appropriate response and grade them clearly on the utterance they make. I have also created a rather rudimentary grading system, which is purely a box ticking exercise that simply allows the examiner to focus more on listening rather than writing. ( see Feedback Sheet )

It was Derrida who once described the utterance as ‘an inscription of air’ ( 1967), only a philosopher of his stature and whose first book was consecrated to the complexity of human speech, long considered in philosophical tradition to be the singular distinguishing mark of man, could have so eloquently described the speech act, but there is something fundamental too in what he is tyring to say, and will strike any EFL teacher, and that is the fact that in order to develop the speaking skills of B1 learners, say, we need, as teachers, to be able to offer them very secure scaffolds so that they might use them as invisible structures upon which to lean on as opposed to merely guessing in the dark. 

Typically most language students will have better speaking skills than they do writing skills so with one eye always on economy of practice, what better way then to make them realise that they will be using very similar sentence structures when they are writing formal discursive essays that typically they will have to be able to reproduce in any accredited international exam, so playing to their strengths will give them a double incentive then when they are doing the speaking activity, as they know that there will be a double reward as they will be able to recycle their discourse in the writing.
 

Feedback Sheet 

Oral Assessment 

Name of Student:__________________________________________

Class : __________________________________  Date: ___________________________

Key Grammatical structures 

CLAUSES ( just place a tick when the student activates one)

DRC                                    CC                                          NDRC                                         SC                

 

Conjunctions/ link words 

and              so            because                  as                   for            and also          but/ however

Other

Vocabulary – collocations – joined & split             

adj/ n                     v/ adv                       adv/adj/n               v- n               v- adv                adv-v               

I typically use the absolutely formidable website https://ieltsliz.com/ielts-speaking-part-3-topics-2/ to get to students to activate the language, and in this way combining both TOEIC and

IELTS materials exposes the students to diverse exams, which can only be a good thing for them. I also find that showing them a short film first of a simulated IELTS speaking test, part 3 for questions that will provoke a more reflective type of discourse in which the students really have to stretch their use of language showing comprehension of supporting an argument, and this, again, is wonderfully muscular practice for the discursive essay that they will eventually have to write at the end of their course. 

Generally, I find that a month’s practice getting the students to use a new lexicon each week and giving them enough practice time in the classroom to try their speaking skills, all of this very practical hand’s on work is a wonderful way to solidify their comprehension of the often much more complicated task of formal written essay composition. I find parallel texts are a great way to get them to solidify their comprehension of major English language grammar structures such as conditionals, getting them to use just 0, 1st and 2nd, particularly with weaker classes, is a great way to bolster their skills and overall comprehension.    

It is very useful for the students to know exactly how and why they are getting the particular grades they are being assigned, and while a mere box ticking activity like ( see Feedback Sheet) this may appear very clinical and rather mechanical, I must confess to abhorring the predominant discourse of so called ‘critical thinking’ that takes place in certain sectors within the industry. Language teachers are more concerned with mechanics, don’t you find, rather then any abstract notions of thinking in any real critical sense. But, if I were to attempt to hang a philosophy on the hat and rather rudimentary coat hanger that is current EFL methodology, I would rather evoke the Swabian forest walker, and the storehouse that quickly gathered him in.

Parallel ESSAY on Advertising Advertisements, and advertising in general, can be extremely useful to both companies and their customers. In this essay, I will be exploring some of the benefits and also some of the disadvantages, before giving my own opinion. One of the greatest advantages of advertising is the fact that you can promote your products as a business, and even possibly introduce them to new customers because of the extensive nature of advertising. Results have shown that companies that promote their services or goods on multi-media platforms will do far better than companies that do not. However, it is very important to do some research identifying clearly your target market before launching a product and spending a lot of money on promoting it either online or through more traditional means. If you did not clearly identify your segment of the market, the market campaign would be pretty much useless and so a waste of money. So, if you want to promote your company, and find new business horizons, you should either hire a professional marketing company which will look after your interests, or do the research and development yourself.    Simple structure  Intro  Paraphrase essay title Say what you will be discussing   Para 1  Advantages  Topic statement + supporting statement  0 + 1st conditionals    Para 2 Topic statement – disadvantages  0 conditional + 2nd conditional    Conclusion -0 conditional – fact

I have noticed a serious decline in academic rigour over the years and particularly in academic writing, so showing the students, step by step, how it is done can be an extremely beneficial skill for them, not only for their academic skills, but also for their own personal skills as it gives them real confidence and a genuine sense of worth.

Ona  final note, I think that a lot of teachers, perhaps due to a lack of confidence, stay away from giving proper writing classes in the classroom, which is a real shame I feel, as the students, in my experience, deeply appreciate any help that you can give them in this area. Of course, in order to be able to teach you need to be able to do them yourself, I spent a considerable amount of time writing out IELTS style essays myself on the commute into work timing myself as I went along. It added a kind of frisson to the classes, after all, if you won’t even try to do it yourself, and in the allotted time, why should you expect them?

 

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