Business English in Slovenian Tertiary Education

The topic of this book is business English in Slovenian tertiary education. If the most important findings are summarised, the following is needed in Slovenian tertiary education with regard to business English teaching: (a) student-centred and learning-centred approach, (b) communicative task-based approach, (c) development of language skills and strategies needed for successful learning, (d) a wide variety of teaching methods, (e) encouraging creativity (of both students and teachers), (f) use of modern information technology, (g) encouraging learner autonomy, self-assessment and cultural awareness of students, (h) increased level of language awareness among students, (i) changes in assessment (fewer traditional written and oral tests, more project work). The business English language teaching profession has been rather slow to incorporate corpus methods into its working practices. On the contrary, materials and teachers rely on a well-established canon of apparently self-evident 'facts' about the language, which have, more or less, the status of tradition in which knowledge is simply handed down from teacher to student. Corpus-based approach in teaching represents a shift towards a more learner-centred paradigm of discovery learning, which enables students to test their own hypotheses and discover their own rules in the process of the so-called data driven learning. When a substantial body of research demonstrates that old concepts are wrong, it is time to adopt new ways of thinking otherwise business English teaching based on intuition and impressionistic interpretations may lead us towards pseudo teaching. Above all, age-old prescriptive attitudes toward grammar and usage in general English that have been reapplied to business English and which inevitably lead to rote learning and regurgitating should be replaced by corpus-based data-driven hypothesis testing learner-centred approach. In other words, oversimplified views about what business English is should be replaced by a more learner-centred paradigm of discovery learning, which enables students to test their own hypotheses or discover their own rules in the process of the so-called data-driven learning.