Business English With First Year Students In Economics

When teaching languages for specific purposes (LSP), such as Business English, the background knowledge of the students, the level of understanding economic terminology, business notions and concept, play a rather crucial part. Though important and of utmost relevance, this aspect is often neglected and language instructors are faced with the situation of having to check and explain such elements instead of counting on the students knowledge in their field of specialization. As desirable as it may be to able to rely on your students’ expertise in the specific domain they are qualifying for and consequently be in the position to even elicit explanations from them when the case, the teachers of LSP more often than not will find themselves in the circumstance of dealing with lexical and conceptual material that seems totally novel for their as yet inexperienced learners. Teachers may not be able to benefit from any ‘specialised’ help in the matter from their students and hence they shall prepare their material such way that they can themselves, if needed, provide at least minimal information on the specialised concepts and specific terminology found in the material they use in teaching the language. The current article discusses this issue of having to adapt to the level of specialised knowledge of the learners when teaching a language for a specific domain to students newly entering the field. It brings a series of opinions on the matter, as found in the literature, and also presents several concrete examples of unexpected vocabulary problems encountered in teaching Business English to first year students in Economics. Thus, the study puts forward the idea of the need for a better harmonisation of curricula in this respect, so that the study of specialised language shall come after the students are at least elementarily ‘initiated’ in the major areas of the domain, so that they can have an idea of what some basic notions they meet in authentic texts may represent and mean.