Bill Mascull is a business materials writer and lexicographer, and has previously taught in Sweden and France. Most recently, he has authored new editions of two business vocabulary books and eBooks: Business Vocabulary in Use Intermediate and Business Vocabulary in Use Advanced. In the first of four posts on teaching Business English, Bill explores the importance of context and word combinations when teaching vocabulary and grammar.
Motivating contexts
You could say that all language production is about combining words in the right order with the right inflections (word endings) to say (or write) something appropriate and meaningful in a particular context and with a particular communicative intention.
In French lessons at school, I remember how the sentences that we were exposed to showed possible word combinations (words in the right order and with the right endings), but with examples that were sometimes bizarre, to say the least. One combination I learned in my first few weeks of French (from a pre-World War Two course book) was ‘Monsieur Oublitout cherche la caserne’ (Mr Forget-all is looking for the barracks). This verb+noun combination with ‘chercher’, is probably not that useful for first-year learners (even if I remember it 50 years later). In this lesson on asking for directions, there were perhaps places that were more useful − combinations with the verb ‘to look for’ − than the barracks!
One of the challenges in general ELT is finding motivating communicative contexts in which to present and practise language. General course books for English (and I hope French) have made great progress in this area in the last 40 years. One of the advantages of business English is that the communicative contexts provide themselves, as it were.
Risky business
All business students, business people (and investors) will need to be able to talk about risk, for example, and will need particular word combinations that are essential for the task. Corpus software, allowing us to analyse vast amounts of text to find the most frequent word patterns, shows us that these are some of the typical noun+noun combinations with ‘risk’. I have given them here along with their definitions.
| risk |
factor | something that contains risk |
| assessment | an evaluation of how much risk is involved in something | |
| aversion | dislike of risk, used in relation to investment | |
| appetite | how much risk a person or business is willing to take | |
| takers | people or organisations who like to take risks | |
| exposure | the amount of risk a person or business is affected by | |
| strategy | how a business plans to deal with different types of risk |
This is how I originally intended to present the combinations in the new edition of Business Vocabulary in Use Advanced. However, advice from an editor persuaded me to present something more ‘human’ to contextualise this vocabulary.
I hope you agree that this defines, illustrates and contextualises the vocabulary nicely.
The related exercise (please see below) practises the vocabulary by getting students to match the combinations with what various businesspeople say about examples of particular types of risk.
Word combinations
Many in-work students will be familiar with these concepts in their own languages, of course, but the equivalent expressions in their own languages may use combinations of words that are in another order, and/or including prepositions, for example. Learning the typical combinations is a key part of becoming a competent English speaker/writer.
Pre-work students will perhaps be learning the actual concepts in the other courses they are following in their studies. For them, learning these combinations and the ideas behind them will go hand in hand. The English classes and subject learning in other classes will hopefully reinforce each other. This is what communicative language teaching is all about. We’re a long way from the barracks!
The second post in this series of four will present some exercise types for vocabulary learning that teachers can create themselves. In the meantime, have a read of Mike McCarthy’s article about why good language teachers should take collocations seriously!