Why Grammar is Still Important

The chorus among my colleagues seems to be reaching a nice harmonious tone about grammar.  All the voices seem to say that it's no longer important.  It's all about communication they say, and has simply no place in the Business English course... well, okay with lower levels, sure we need it.  And if it causes a misunderstanding, certainly.

I started listening to this siren song some time ago and began to all but remove grammar from my lesson plans.  I gave some feedback, but gone was the 90 minute lesson on getting all our 'if's and 'would's in the right place.  But over time, I feel the pull of grammar bringing me back and while I'm still not running entire lessons focused on a certain element, grammar is tangible in nearly every lesson.  So, I thought I would spell out a few reasons why it's still okay to teach grammar (even to higher levels) and why we can even learn to love it again.

1.  Grammar is image

We have been watching Cars a lot in my house lately.  Cars and Cars 2 are films from Disney/Pixar about a race car, Lightning McQueen, and his best friend, Tow Mater, a lovable redneck tow truck.  In the second movie they introduce Finn McMissile, a soave British secret agent.

Michael Caine and Larry the Cable Guy. 
Photo of Michael Caine: Harry Wad, both from wikipedia.org



Here's a quiz based on these two pictures:

1. Which man is the voice of the lovable redneck tow truck?
2. Which man is the voice of the soave British secret agent?
3. Who uses the sentence... "My apologies, I haven't properly introduced myself."
4. Who uses the sentence, "Ah!  I knowed you wasn't gonna leave without sayin' goodbye!"
5. Which image would your learners most like to portray?

My point is that grammar is somewhat like a set of clothes.  Do we want to send our learners into a meeting dressed like Larry the Cable Guy?  This type of appearance probably isn't going to help them persuade others or defend their ideas.  Sure, other NNSs may give them allowances, but having good grammar shows qualities useful in business, namely persistence, hard work, mastery, and attention to detail. 

2.  Without grammar it's not language teaching

The basic truth is that our learners expect teaching in grammar.  It is one of the core aspects they expect in our classes.  Sure they may not want to spend a lot of time listening to the teacher drone on about when to use the past perfect, but grammar is one of the ways they measure their own progress.  Unlike vocabulary, which they may or may not see again in their daily lives, they will recognize grammar.  It also helps the learners battle ambiguity.  Especially in writing, they have fewer doubts, "Is this right or not?"  That is a big confidence boost.

In fact, grammar serves as the key to unlock meaning.  We often ask our learners to try to define unknown words in context.  We ask them to find collocations and lexical chunks.  Without understanding the grammar, they cannot perform these tasks.  For more difficult texts, it can be very difficult for them to even distinguish the core sentence from the accompanying clauses.  Giving them a set of keys to unlock meaning will give them more freedom to understand outside the class room.  Without it, they are limited to the set phrases and functional sentences we give them.  If they aren't used, the learners will struggle.

3.  Grammar is relatively easy to teach

Let's be honest, we can't walk into every classroom every week and be 100% engaged.  Setting up and evaluating skills training can be hard work.  Listening for lexical gaps and absent functional phrases takes immense concentration.  Sometimes we are tired, distracted, or just plain having a rough day.  Identifying and filling grammar deficiencies is much easier to do.  We should certainly try to do more when monitoring, but it's not always possible.

Grammar provides a great way for the teacher to relax a little bit.  We all have a bank of grammar based activities and ideas to draw upon at a moment's notice.  We all have our standard way of teaching the present perfect continuous and passive modals.  Sometimes it does us good to dust those off and have a nice standard grammar lesson.  The learners will get something and the teacher can live to fight another day.

4.  Grammar teaching supports awareness of language

By dissecting the language, the learners are practicing the skill of analyzing what they say and how they say it.  This supports our other training areas.  It shows them that small things can make a huge difference.  It then becomes easier to show them how word choice can change the tone of a sentence.  We can then show them why formal language is different than informal language.  It better enables us to show how discourse markers help the listener to understand.  Etc., etc.

My approach

I continue to listen politely to my colleagues about grammar.  And I will give them one concession,  we need to prioritize which grammatical elements to include.  There are many steps between Finn McMissile and Tow Mater.  We need to think about which elements will help them fit the image they want to portray.

I now include a grammar element in nearly every lesson I have.  Sometimes it is planned based on the text/listening, sometimes it is feedback driven, but it is always there.  It worries me when dismissing grammar in Business English training becomes so common that we take it for granted.  In meetings with other trainers it seems as though we compete at who teaches it the least.  This is not the right approach and is not helping our learners.  But I suspect many of them are secretly teaching it anyway :)

So, learn to embrace it and love it... just don't let it get too passionate.

Review lesson and tax lesson using authentic materials

The two lessons I taught this morning... both received high praise.

Context

The client is an international tax consultancy.  The lessons are held on-site and the minimalistic luxurious conference room is equipped with a large flatscreen intended for videoconferencing, but accomodates my computer hook up as well.  There are two groups, 90 min once a week.  The first group is lower level (A2-B1) of mostly clerks who conduct more straightforward tax declartions for international clients and then a higher group (B1-B2) which consists mostly of advisors who guide their clients through international tax regulation.  The lesson today for the first group was to review what we had learned.  The follow lesson to the higher group was based on the Germany-US Double Taxation Agreement.

Lesson One - Review

I had just returned from vacation so we when through my selection of photos and discussed what makes a good beach.

Then we began the real lesson...

• I gave them an envelope filled with the vocabulary words we had seen over the past few lessons.  I keep a running excel list of vocab which I send to them post lesson.  The spreadsheet is open during the lesson and instead of a whiteboard I fill the columns.  To create the cards, I simply paste to word, change the size of the cells, print, and cut out.
• Then, I asked them to choose 4 colors from a selection of color cards I collected from the hardware store.

• Next, I asked them to group the words by color.  In order to do this, the learners had to understand the word and explain to their group why it should fit with the color.  In the process they were explaining the meanings of the unknown words.  I stepped in for troublesome words they were avoiding and asked for the pronunciation of other (like exaggerate).  But the rationale was their own.  For example, one group put 'to order' with the caramel color because he envisioned ordering dessert.  Because their office phones have a green button to make a call, both groups placed all the telephone words with green.  The next time we do telephoning, I will probably print the exercises on green paper.  Words from the email lesson tended to be in blue.... hmmm.
• They then changed groups and had to explain to others how they had grouped the words.  I filled in gaps and answered questions.  By the end, I was confident that we had reviewed and could use most of the words, especially the business specific lexis.
• We then moved onto a jeopardy game to assess our learning.  I used a free jeopardy game for this and two teams.  It was effective and students like it.  I recommend the site.  Note:  You will have to download the application and the game text file to make sure it works on your computer.  I did not use the online version because I am never 100% certain about connection and I don't like the ads.
  
  You can find the online game version of the game we played here.
• To conclude the lesson we reviewed our course plan and expectations and discussed what was working, what they had used in their jobs, and what could be improved.

Lesson Two - Double Taxation Agreements

The second lesson began as the first, with my vacation pictures... but they wanted to chat a bit more comparing Italy and Croatia.  No problem... let them play with the English a bit.

Then the lesson began...

• Warmer - what is a Double Taxation Agreement (DTA) and why do we need them?
  Here are the discussion questions... this allowed those with more experience to clarify what we are talking about (actually all the participants work with regulations like this).
  
  Why do taxation agreements exist?
  What flaws are in these agreements?  Give examples.
  Are there any loopholes which can be exploited?  Give examples.
  
• Next, I gave them a word cloud from the US-Germany DTA.  The document was available from the IRS website in the US.  I cut and pasted it into wordle and printed to pdf.  I handed out copies of the cloud.  The task was like Taboo.  They had to describe words and their partner had to say which word from the cloud they meant.  This was a risky deep-ending activity and I wasn't sure, but their command of lexis in this discourse community was quite good.  I only jumped in to challenge them a bit and make sure some of the key words were covered.  By the end of the activity their minds were ready for the text.


They did not receive the whole text, only the cases included in the treaty (starting page 7).
Germany US DTA

• Luckily for me the US-Germany DTA included specific examples for how to apply the treaty.  When I use contracts and formal legal documents in the future, I will search for these examples.  One example reads...

          Facts:

A third-country resident establishes a German company for the purpose of acquiring a large U.S. manufacturing company. The sole business activity of the German company (other than holding the stock of the U.S. company) is the operation of a small retailing outlet which sells products manufactured by the U.S. company. Is the German company entitled to treaty benefits under paragraph 1(c) with respect to dividends it receives from the U.S. manufacturer?

The task was to read the case and check understanding with a partner.

• Next, the learners were to describe their situation to their 'tax advisor' and find out if they could use the DTA and why.  The 'tax advisors' were given the answers from the DTA.  For example the answer to the case above reads...

          Analysis:

The dividends would not be entitled to benefits. Although there is, arguably, a business connection between the U.S. and the German businesses, the "substantiality" test described in the preceding examples is not met.

• They were having trouble with this task and understanding was not 100% so I gave them a follow-up task.   Explain the case using graphic representation.  Show the investors, subsidiaries, dividend flow, etc.  This produced the outcome I was looking for.  They were better able to explain the situation and why the DTA did or did not apply in this case.  One woman stated during the lesson, "These are exactly like the cases we deal with on a daily basis.  Where did you get these examples?"
• The surrounding discussion was amazing.  The learners were activating vocabulary.  I was able to make corrections on functional language.  We had reached flow.  In addition, they were linking all this to their previous knowledge and questioning if the US-Germany DTA was really so.  They were learning more than just English.

So... two great lessons this morning.  One a simple review lesson, the second shows the benefits of a good communicative event analysis ("I have to explain the impacts of double taxation") and tapping the discourse community.

Lessons learned from the military to BE

Back from vacation and ready to work :)

As some of you may know, I was in the US Army before I was an English trainer.  As a Sapper (combat engineer) my life was consumed by the neverending cycle of training-execution-training.  During my seven years in the military and three years in combat, I rose to the position of platoon sergeant, including designing several company training programs in insurgent tactics and dealing with improvised explosive devices.  I was passionate about training and adopted the military's models and processes whole-heartedly.

Your author doing a little training... note, I had to swim back, too.

However, after my CELTA and beginning in the BE field, I seemed to forget much of what I had learned and practiced during my previous career.  It wasn't until about a year ago that I sat down and took stock of my military experience and how it applied to my new passion.  In the end, I distilled five points which apply to in-company training.

1.  The Mission Essential Task List (METL)

A METL is a list of key tasks a unit must be able to successfully accomplish in order to fulfill their mission.  For example, when I entered the Army in 2002, we were still trained in the 1980-90s conventional warfare skills.  In that situation, a combat engineer platoon must be able to emplace a standard NATO minefield.  This essential task supported the company's METL to emplace a battional defense.  Below platoon, a squad had a list of essential supporting tasks for the minefield.  Below that, each individual soldier had to master a list of key tasks (such as arm a mine) for the whole unit to be successful.

As an English trainer, this shows us two things.  First, our learners do not exist in communication isolation.  They belong to teams, departments, and business units.  The individual skills we teach them are part of a larger goal.  It is helpful for us to consider how we are supporting these goals.  Second, the key skills needed by the learners are mostly determined by their position within the structure.  In English training, the most generic METL is the ALTE can do statements.  These are particularly valuable for pre-experienced learners just as the individual soldier task list drives the basic training program in the Army.  However, once we are in-company, a key part of pertinent training is defining the essential skills for the learners, their teams, and their departments.

2.  Task, Condition, Standard (TCS)

To evaulate performance, every task needed is outlined using the task, condition, standard format.  Basically, the task is restating what the learner should be able to do.  The condition outlines the environment in which they are expected to perform the task.  And finally the standard is a 'checklist' of performance steps for them to correctly execute.

For example, here are the standards for throwing a hand grenade:

FM 3-23.30 Grenades and Pyrotechnic Signals, Dept. of the Army, approved for public release 

Back to English teaching, this sounds like something we should be doing with our skills training.  Yet measuring can do statements in this way is not universal.  Oxford University Press and John Hughes have taken a step in this direction with their skills assessment criteria in the Teacher Book from Business Result.  However, I would like to see more of this in 'opening a meeting', 'making arrangements on the telephone', etc.  For myself, I have set the task of writing out some of these performance steps and the conditions under which they must be performed (e.g. in a conference room with projector and presentation).  Perhaps we need to borrow something from our academic colleagues on this one... they are the experts at assessment.

Writing a letter home in 2003 near Hit, Iraq

3.  Crawl-Walk-Run

Once each needed skill is defined in the METL and the TCSs are set, the military trains to proficiency using the crawl, walk, run approach.  Under this approach, the task and the standards are kept the same, but the conditions are changed.  This means increasing speed, spontaneity, complexity, and realism.

From FM 7-1 Battle Focused Training, Dept. of the Army, approved for public release

Note, the performance steps remain the same, only the situation becomes more difficult.  For example, in a presentation setting, this could mean that questions from the audience become more difficult, speakers could have non-native accents, etc.

In general, I try to incorporate this into my training.  So, when the learners become confident that they can participate in a meeting, I start adding more challenging elements.  For example, I will add in listening with Asian accents, add the element of interruptions and unclear vocabulary, place the meeting under pressure constraints such as time or consensus, reduce/remove prep time, add an additional skill like note taking, etc.  This helps build the difficulty.

4.  Train as you fight, fight as you train

This all adds up to the next lesson.  In the military the goal (especially in the run phase) is to make the training as realistic as possible.  In the Army this means using live ammunition, throwing in surprises, and generally making the situation as confusing as possible.

I believe once our learners in the BE classroom have mastered the basics in the supportive environment of the classroom, it is time to make the training reflect the real world.  In group classes, here is where the participants themselves really add to the course.  They can ask the tough questions and play the role of difficult people.  They can give the pointed criticism needed to make the situation more realistic.  As Claire Hart pointed out on her blog, getting the learners out of the class on the factory floor adds needed realism.

In short, we need to prepare them for the battlefield.


5.  The After Action Review (AAR)

The final lesson distilled was the importance of the After Action Review.  Basically, this was a post training meeting to take stock of our performance and formally acknowledges strengths, areas for improvement, and lessons learned.  In the military, we had formal drawn out AARs with written summaries but perhaps more effective were the 5 minutes 'hot wash' AARs.  In these short meetings we sat down as a team and discussed the training event with the following agenda.

• Review the training objective
• What was supposed to happen?
• Relavent training resources we used
• What happened?  Why?
• What did we do well?
• What do we need better?
• What lessons did we learn?
• Make a plan to improve shortcomings and build upon strengths

Overall, AARs were direct and candid, but never personal.  I am still amazed at how the participants were able to criticism.  But the key factor here was that everyone had the same goal... make the team better.

In an in-company training environment we need to use AAR like breaks to critically assess our performance.  In some courses, this can be done after every lesson.  But not all of our participants are going to have such thick skins.  As trainers, our job is to effectively observe their performance and offer feedback without hurting any feelings or damaging reputations.  This is certainly not easy, but the AAR was the key link between our current skills and future improvement.

Conclusion

I am certainly not advocating that we systematically formalize all of our training and execute it lock-step as we did in the military.  Much is to be said for the holistic approach, and such formalized training does not always align with the learners' expectations and desires.  Additionally, implementing these methods requires a significant amount of planning and admin time which can eat away at choosing and designing the best activities.  However, I feel that as professional in-company trainers, such an approach toward training helps us to ensure that the time spent in class is actually making a positive impact on their job performance.

Freelancers: Doing the Math

To start, thanks to Phil Wade for his recent post on life as a freelancer and the challenges it entails.  Based on his insights, it may then be the right time to discuss how to manage your freelance business.

Working in Thirds

Based on management consulting, law firms, and other professional trainers we have a nice model to shoot for.  They tend to work in thirds.

1. 33% billable hours
2. 33% developing the product
3. 33% developing the company

Billable Hours

In nearly all cases, this means class time.  The goal here is to charge a high enough rate that it covers the other two thirds of your time.  There are two considerations then when setting pricing targets.  First, we need to determine how much we want to earn and fit it with what the market will handle.  Second we need to look at it from the client's perspective in regards to how many total training hours they will receive.

For example, let's assume we want to earn €36,000 per year net.  This means we will need to send out about €60,000 in invoices (not including sales tax) to cover income taxes, health insurance, retirement, etc.  Assuming there are 1760 working hours in a year (44 weeks x 40 hours), we will have to set our prices at €102/hour to reach this goal.  This is because we are assuming that only 1/3 of our time will be billable.

But it also depends on the training.  If we have 6 participants in a course for 1 hour, that is 6 training hours.  This translates to roughly €17 for each participant.  Yes, these numbers seem a bit high for some markets, but we'll look at how we can make up for that.

Developing the Product

This third includes several tasks.

• Training prep
• Materials writing
• Identifying and adapting materials
• Travel
• Post-lesson correspondance, feedback, and notes
• Professional research with direct training impact (e.g. reading a CUP teacher's handbook or english onestop)

Most freelancers I have worked with tend to underestimate how much time this takes or bill accordingly for it.  But the answer is rather simple... charge for what you do.

If a client is receiving fully customized training, the time spent to develop and produce that training is billable.  After all, a consulting firm doesn't only charge for the time they are in meetings, rather also for the research and preparation.  If you walk into a company and say, "I add 30 min of billable time for each hour of your training so that I can provide you with a fully customized package," most will easily accept the proposal.

There are other ways to make this time add to the bottom line.  If you are running a course website or online portal, this is also billable and is training.  If you are offering assistance per email or telephone for participants, this is billable.  If you are sending the participants follow up exercizes and links to websites post-lesson or part of your flipped classroom concept, this time is billable.  If the client does not want to pay for it... don't do it.  This will then leave you room for upselling in the future.

My recommendation is that the basic classroom training is the door opener.  Then once trust is built and they are satisfied with the training, additional outside the conference room support can be added to the project.

Developing the Company

This is perhaps the most important but also most neglected areas for longer term business success.  These activities include:

• Billing and admin tasks, including handling taxes and expenses
• Marketing and branding
• Industry profile (social networking in ELT, blogging, article writing, professional organizations, conferences, etc.)
• External profile (social networking with target market, website & advertising, identifying and acquiring new/prospective clients, retaining and upselling current clients)
• Professional development not related to a specific client (conferences, training courses, online/print research, etc.)

These tasks will never be paid directly by a client, but are the ticket to stability and business growth.  Also, they almost never result in an immediate return on investment, but when they do pay off it happens suddenly and big.

The Work Week

So, by allocating and dividing our time in thirds (and supporting it financially) freelancers can achieve business growth, stability, and obtain a more suitable work life balance without burning the midnight oil.

To close, let's make this a little more tangible by showing how this would look for a normal 40 hour work week.

14 hours in class

13 hours developing the product

• 5 hours preparation - some billable
• 2 hours out-of-class contact (email feedback, course website, etc.) - all billable
• 2 hours travel
• 2 hours professional research for specific clients
• 2 hours writing materials

13 hours developing the business

• 4 hours industry profile
• 4 hours external profile
• 3 hours professional development
• 2 admin work (the key here is to make this as efficient as possible)

Of course this is only averaged.  In fact, the times will shift depending on priority.  But the concept remains the same.  We need to manage our time and maintain flexible prices to accurately reflect the value we are providing our clients.  But perhaps more importantly, we need to balance our well-being with our clients' expectations while still meeting our financial goals.

Intercultural Training; The Options for a BE Trainer

Of course any issue covered by Chia Soun Chong gains immediate attention and debate.  And of course it is great to see some of my mentors like Marjorie Rosenberg and Ed Pegg add their thoughts.  So, I figured it might be time for me to reflect a bit on my approach to intercultural communication and how it applies to my business English training.

I have identified several options for the BE trainer to train the effect of cultural interference on their communication.

Option 0 - Ignore it.

Option 1 - Train 'above the surface' aspects for various cultures (etiquette, dos and don'ts).

Option 2 - Train values, norms, and beliefs for selected countries pertaining to class or likely interactions (often BRIC and US/UK).

Option 3 - Train learners about their own culture (whole iceberg) to raise awareness of differences and perceptions.

Option 4 - Train overarching concepts of inter-cultural communication (e.g high/low context, ethnocentrism, non-verbal message codes, uncertainty avoidance).

Option 5 - Train learners to recognize when culture has affected communication and how to resolve it.  This is often in the form of 'critical incident' training.

In discussion with Carl Dowse, he offered another option, giving learners a skill set (such as that provided in Bob Dignan's book Communicating Internationally in English) for the learners to handle a range of cultures and personalities.

Each of these options has advantages and disadvantages and the choice should depend on the training situation.  For this reason, the trainer should know when to apply various resources in training.  Course books handle this in various ways.  For example, Market Leader has tended to go for option 1, whereas Intelligent Business has gone with a mix of option 3 and 4 with an introduction to inter-cultural communication concepts and a rating scale for the learner to assess their own culture.  Either could be appropriate depending on the learners.

For this reason, we need some kind of assessment criteria for how to introduce this into our training.  I offer several criteria...

Needs - what do they want?
Time - how much time do we have and are we sacraficing language work?
Trainer and learner expertise/experience
ROI - how much will the training impact their communication effectiveness?
Behavior change - how much will the learners change/have to change to meet the goal?
Relavence - how likely are they to experience these concepts?
General to specific - where do we balance dealing with culture and handling personality types?

On this last point, we need to assess which cultures we are talking about here.  Ed Pegg and I were on the verge of a book deal on this one in Glasgow.  Hopefully, he can remember what we talked about.  Are they purely national?  Probably not.  Instead, they most likely include a whole range of cultural influences.

At the end of day, we can look at the materials we have and determine which option is best.  In my case, I most often find that option 3, teaching them their own culture from an outsider point of view, is most effective.  I train monoligual and often monocultural classes.  For them, the greatest benefit comes from seeing that what is normal and understood amongst themselves is often a far cry from what outsiders see, hear, and believe.

To give you an idea of the training, I have included the template presentation I give to my German learners.  Not all slides are used in training and this presentation does not include the discussion or activities which emerge from it.  These slides are generally introduced with the scenario: "This is training for employees in the US.  Your job is to review the presentation and determine if it is accurate and helpful for them."

Germany intercultural communication training

View more presentations from charlesrei.

So with all these options, it really is up to the trainer and learner to decide on what the right course of action is.  Simply training culture merely because it is in the material is not the best plan.  Additionally, not considering it at all is certainly not appropriate.  As business English trainers, our mandate is to improve the communication our clients.  If we stop at the present perfect continuous we are not realzing our value sold.

Book Review - Webinars: A Cookbook for Educators by Nicky Hockly

The Barcelona edtech community of The Round and close allies The Consultants E published their second ebook this week, Webinars:  A Cookbook for Educators by Nicky Hockly.  The author sets out to give the reader the recipe for great webinars and for the most part delivers on her promise.

The goal of The Round is to fill the gap between blogging and publishing, and here they have done just that.  By working with Ms. Hockly, perhaps the world's foremost expert on webinar language training, they have successfully given readers an affordable and convienent guide to running webinars without the hassle of chasing down her archive of blogs, interviews, and discussions.  The author draws nicely on her 20 years of experience as the ebook is laced with links to examples and activities, many from Ms. Hockly herself.

In fact, these are perhaps the most valueable parts of the book.  The videos clearly show the ingredients for making your online session a success.  Unfortunately, I read mine on a traditional B&W Kindle and had to transfer the links to my laptop.  IPad users will be able to benefit from the interactivity of the book.  It is nice to see the tech experts utilize the possibility of enhanced ebooks, something they largly neglected with their first title, 52.

Ms. Hockly begins her instructional guide by showing us around the technology.  She takes us back in time a bit and demonstrates how useful some of the older technology can be, like text chat and audio only.  For trainers who have never attended a webinar or run online training, this step-by-step approach is certainly worthwhile.  The end of each chapter includes 5, 10, and 30 minute activities to apply the lessons to real life.  When the book reaches video conferencing, she does a great job of evaluating the pros and cons of each platform.  Yet for business English trainers, especially those in-company, the absence of Cisco WebEx and Microsoft Live Meeting will be noticeable.  It is also clear from the author that she prefers Adobe Connect above the others.

The second half of the book builds on this platform knowledge and deals with organizing and running a webinar.  Of valuable note here is that the book does not appear to be directed at training language learners, rather to teacher trainers using webinars for professional development.  While her activities and structures can be used in the online classroom, her examples and descriptions are all from CPD situations.  Nonetheless, Ms. Hockly gives the reader a useful list of basic opening and closing activities to bookend a successful webinar.  For those who have never organized a webinar, her list of tasks for moderators and presenters is required reading.  She closes by giving us a nice range of one-liners from other experienced webinar warriors and you will no doubt recognize most of the names.  This certainly added the cherry on top of dessert.

In short, Cookbook is written for inexperienced trainers in online training.  It provides the reader with an excellently organized and easily affordable (€5.15) handbook for setting up and running professional webinars.  Old hands in the virtual environment can also benefit by benchmarking their current webinars against her nearly flawless examples.  However, for trainers who are currently struggling to adapt their face-to-face language training to the online environment, the real recipes are in her earlier work Teaching Online from Delta Publishing.

Busy Lives and Homework; Getting more than 90 min a week

Business English learners don't do homework.  Well, at least mine don't.  With only 60 or 90 minutes of English a week, making progress without self-study is like, well... you know. 

The root cause for this is misleading.  They will always say, "I don't have time because I am so busy."  But this is not actually true.  In reality, because English is a tool for work, studying English in their free time is the same as taking their work home.  At a time when everyone is talking about maintaining their work-life balance, English for work simply falls off the priority list.  But all hope is not lost.  By being open about homework and understanding how the student sees it, we can increase their involvement.

What can I say... I didn't do my homework either.

First, ask the learners sometime near the beginning of the course how much time they are willing to dedicate learning English outside of the the classroom. Enter some kind of informal agreement on dedication.

Then we need to understand the thinking of the learner. They will go through several stages...

1. They will test it. At this point, it is up to the trainer to say that this is a test. If the self-study experience feels like a burden or requirement with the corresponding negative emotions, it will not continue. The trainer should get feedback for the learner whether this type of self-study is enjoyable, challenging, and effective. Designing activities which fit learning styles is particularly important at this stage because they will find suitable activities more enjoyable.

2. They will look for reward. In the adult learning environment, this will be primarily peer respect. However, trainer respect can also go a long way. If the others see the respect they get for completing the homework, others will seek that reward. When one or two people complete self-study I like to give them the chance to shine in class. This could be simply by having the others congratulate (a little applause) them or by having the learners teach what they learned. It could be to set up activities which use the material to let these specific learners have an advantage (all will notice). The problem with this is that increasing levels of reward are needed. This is often where games and competitions come in.  Karl Dean has been kind enough to share some of the ways he builds rewards and games into his lessons and inspires self-study.  Please check out his accompanying blog post here.

3. They will expect to see progress.  At this point, the trainer's job is to build the self-study into the self-reflective process. This means including questions like, "What have you learned outside of class in the last two months?" It can also be done during a class feedback discussion if there is time. If the activities are not chosen well and the learners do not sense and acknowledge progress, they will abandon homework.

4. They will experiment further. Convinced now that homework can increase progress, they will begin to experiment. The trainer's role is to provide direction, acknowledge and spread this experimentation. Here it can be helpful to develop 'subject matter experts' (SMEs) within the group. For example, one student can be the verb tenses expert, one can be the financial vocab expert, etc. We can now beginning supporting this self-study by turning over parts of our lessons to our SMEs.
Each learner will move through or drop out of the stages at different speeds. One of the challenges I see is trying to adjust when the individual learners have different time committments and are at different steps in the process. I certainly haven't perfected homework, but I am getting better results using this theory.
By understanding these stages of thinking we can design and change our homework assignments.

Ah the horrible memories!  Grandfather helping the grandchildren
with their homework by Lukian Popov

This brings us to some general tips:

• Start small, but with a concrete tasks.  Give them models of what should be done and guide them to completion.
• Play with various types of homework to fit with learning style and preference.
• Visual tasks (mind maps, pictures and colors, highlighting texts, graphically reworking class notes)
• Auditory tasks (prepare a verbal review of the last lesson, podcasts, finding target language in listening files, writing dialogs)
• Kinesthetic tasks (moving note cards, java exercises, going and 'finding' language, activities which make the language tangible)
• 'The Old Guard' (gap fills, crosswords, matching, etc.)
• Provide learners with a menu of homework.
• Add a peer check to the homework, e.g. "Email all the participants your review of this article and five words you learned."
• Do not make the next lesson hinge on their homework.  Always have a plan for zero completion.
• Check the homework in class... this takes lesson time, don't underestimate the time.  For them the homework was more of a committment than attending the lesson.
• Make homework a routine.  Perhaps not every lesson, but regularly (I prefer every other week).
• Don't forget about the things we did 3-6 months ago.
• Build buy-in with praise, attention, and demostrated progress.

These are certainly no magic bullet, but they are definitely more effective than simply handing out a worksheet with an answer key and hoping.  But who knows, maybe over time we can convince them that both of their personalities (work and personal) can benefit from speaking a second language.