Business And Professional English: Why Not Making Good Use Of Online Assistance Tools

In my experience, both, part-time students and full-time students, the future actual users of business or special profession English are often too excessively preoccupied with the accuracy of their English, and are thus, seriously hindered in their professional communication. This might not be such an issue with oral communication, where fluency seems easily to be recognized as the prevailing element of efficient communication. In written communication, however, where a "written track" is left behind, language accuracy certainly cannot be dismissed that light-heartedly. With this respect, it would be expected that students or English language users will, as a kind of "practical way-out", self-initiatively resort to using various forms of online language assistance tools such as templates, spell-checkers, glossaries, online editors, documents generators, etc. It is surprising, however, that students, despite the abundance of such aids on the Internet need to be explicitly directed, guided, and assured by the lecturer that the use of these aids is quite recommendable and legitimate. On the other hand, it is, of course, necessary for the lecturer to show the students on practical examples that this is only true, if they know how to use and place them correctly in their own texts. The task of the lecturer and the focus of the present paper is, therefore, to provide students with guidance for a reasonable and meaningful "lifting" of expressions, filling out of templates or generating fairly independent texts, typical of a particular business or professional situation.