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This Teaching English for Business certification course has caused me to consider how to improve the effectiveness of my English teaching preparation. I have had the privilege of teaching English for 5 years in an Asian University setting, and I am now preparing to move to another country to seek employment. It is quite possible that I will teach English in a Business setting, which is why I took this course. Teaching English has been an absolute joy as I have met many interesting people and learned so much through living in another country. However, the part of English teaching that I struggle with most is course development and lesson planning. When I am in the classroom I love it and I am “in my element”, but I find the preparation for teaching both laborious and time-consuming. Therefore, I was pleasantly surprised and greatly helped by the content of this course, especially Units 3, 4 and 5. For this summative task, I will begin to process how some of this new knowledge will inform my future teaching endeavors for the sake of enhancing my students’ language learning experience. Unit 3 of this course walks through a logical and chronological process for course development. While I have previously found Level Testing to be commonly discussed in language teaching, Needs Analysis seems to be discussed much less. At least, I have encountered it much less, but this is possibly because it wasn’t on my radar to give much consideration. From this course, I have come to understand how both needs analysis and needs negotiation will be very important and extremely useful as I prepare to teach Business English in a variety of situations and contexts. As a reflected on this, it occurred to me that it might actually be that the needs and/or goals of three different parties might affect how a course is developed. Naturally, the students’ needs must always be considered, but it may also be advantageous/necessary to take into account the goals of the company they work for if that company has hired me. Thirdly, if my employer has particular goals in mind, this may also have some impact on course development. For example, if my employer has certain teaching materials that they have developed or are marketing this could affect course development. Although this makes needs analysis sound quite complex, overall I find it helpful to have thought this through beforehand. Overall, I am encouraged by how both needs analysis and needs negotiation can be useful in helping to refine my course development efforts. There are two other topics from this course that will be useful for increasing the effectiveness of my course preparation, and they are syllabus design and using authentic/non-authentic materials. Of course, I have designed a syllabus before, but I can definitely improve in this area by being more intentional and structured at the beginning of the course, and being sure to put together a complete course syllabus including unit names, skills covered, grammar/vocabulary involved, tasks/functions of this language and resources to be used. I can see how improving my skills in syllabus design and taking the time to do this well will inform and make lesson planning a much more enjoyable process. Lastly, I found the discussion on using authentic and non-authentic materials to be a timely reminder for me as it showed me how authentic materials in particular can be very useful in the Business English setting, especially as company documents and examples can help lesson content be more relevant and applicable for my students and their needs. In conclusion, this course has given me a multiplicity of tools for improving my teaching preparation, a few of which have been addressed in this essay. Because of what I’ve learned in this course, I am now even more excited for my next teaching assignment as this course has addressed some of the least enjoyable aspects of teaching English for me and given me hope and tools improvement. I look forward to using needs analysis/negotiation, syllabus design and authentic/non-authentic materials in order to enhance both my teaching skills and my students’ language learning experience.
