engleski

Creating a Business English Course book for Academic Needs: Challenges and Solutions

Abstract Business English (BE) is often referred to as the lingua franca of the business community. It has therefore become an indispensable element of business school curricula where it plays an important role in developing students' competencies required for academic achievement and professional success in the business community. BE coursebooks therefore play an important role in the education of future economists and business professionals. Yet, most BE publications only partially cover the needs of language learners at higher education institutions (HEIs). This is because BE syllabi at HEIs vary to a large extent and because BE student groups vary in size and ability. The creation of a syllabus- oriented BE coursebook by language teachers working at HEIs is therefore a logical step in targeting business students’ needs. The aim of this paper is to present the challenges of writing such a coursebook and the solutions that a group of language teachers teaching BE at the Faculty of Economics and Business of the University of Zagreb, Croatia found while creating a syllabus-oriented BE coursebook. The paper discusses major challenges: a lack of professional expertise in creating economic content, a lack of financial resources and specific requirements of class organization and target student groups. The paper then offers the authors’ solutions to these challenges. A close cooperation with business and economics professors in the process of writing helped overcome the lack of expert knowledge, while the focus on plentiful language exercises helped in the acquisition of word partnerships typical of language for specific purposes. The organization of units in line with the task- oriented rather than communicative approach helped overcome the problem of teaching to large student groups. Even though the focus of this paper is on the creation of a BE coursebook, we believe that creating a coursebook for academic audiences in other courses and areas taught at HEIs faces similar problems. Therefore, the challenges and solutions presented in this paper might contribute to broader discussions of what constitutes a good academic coursebook.

Academic coursebook ; Higher education ; ESP ; Business English ; Teacher-authors ; Syllabus

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