Business English is the largest of the English For Special Purpose categories and covers both native speakers and non-native speakers.

Please pay careful attention to students and company needs in this area, because I've noticed too many books put too much emphasis on cultural awareness and not enough on basic business needs. Also if a company is paying for a course, they don't expect you to tell their employees how to write an effective CV!

For grammar practice, please see the general English sections of this Website.

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Resources on this Website

Multimedia Resources

Video Resources - Our video & MP3 material
Listening Resources - Including how to introduce yourself effectively and business news.

Business Presentations

PowerPoint Guide
Our guide to getting the most from PowerPoint
Impress
Our guide to getting the most from the free presentation software Impress
Resources
Downloadable presentation resources

Business Documents

Business writing
Our in-depth guide to Writing Business documents
Business Report Writing
Our complete guide to report Writing.
Referencing system
Reference your sources properly for reports

Meeting Skills

Sound Scripting
Make your speeches and presentations more natural.
Pronunciation
Our Pronunciation guide is a great place to start work on accent neutralisation.
Business Meeting Prompts & Lesson Idea (128KB PDF)
A project meeting lesson with prompts for participants and roles, optionally the can be done in the style of Donald Trump's The Apprentice.
Tourism Project Meeting prompts (264KB PDF)
Cue cards to encourage speaking and roleplay in a meeting context.

Other Business Skills

Speed Reading
How to improve your reading speed.
Mindmaps
How to use mindmaps effectively
Business Departments (60KB PDF)
Business department summary sheet with comprehension questions
Spoken-Phonetic alphabet (52KB PDF)
Used by the military, pilots and tele-operators throughout the world. (Not to be confused with IPA)
Describing Graphs (79KB PDF)
An exercise to help students build vocabulary related to graphs.
House Plan (216KB PDF)
A nice warmer for a negotiation workshop. i.e. They have to fight over who gets the master bedroom.
Dress Codes (317 KB PDF)
Complete Lesson plan with Matching cards and exercises to assist students understanding of dress codes.
How Do You Like To Learn? (52KB PDF)
Survey to encourage trainee centred learning.

Webmerise Case study

Webmerise was a small Internet design company, here is some of the sales literature that they produced:

Advertise with Us (28KB PDF)
A sample flyer for use in lessons
Full Page leaflet (132KB PDF)
Advertising Webdesign services
White Paper (64KB PDF)
9 page whitepaper discussing the role of the Internet

USEFUL WEBSITES

Times 100
Great examples and marketing theory.

Busines Know How
Some wonderful resources, but the navigation is a bit clumsy.

Entrepreneur.com
A good site with plenty of resources.

Bogglesworld
Quite a lot of good handouts and materials, but not its strongest area.