Effective communication starts with two key elements: Audience & Purpose. In order to get across any message, we need to know who we are sharing our information with, and for what reason. In this workshop we take ideas and methods from the field of English for Academic Purposes and apply them to our own contexts so we can help our learners to communicate more coherently. Focusing in particular on the written form, we can shine a light on just how particular words, phrases and structures can be played with and modified so that that the resulting text resonates with the intended audience and successfully fulfils its purpose. To facilitate the workshop activities, please bring along anonymised samples of students’ written work – checking that confidentiality is not breached of course! Alternatively, bring pieces of your own writing.
Michelle Hunter has been teaching business English for 22 years in and around Stuttgart. In the summer of 2014 she delved into the field of teaching English for academic purposes (EAP) in the UK. While this branch of EFL teaching is for university students aiming to achieve academic success, Michelle noticed how transferable certain ideas and language-focused teaching materials were to her business English classes. In particular, she has found academic writing skills feed nicely into business report writing and presentations. This has been useful with both her DHBW students as well as in-company clients. Michelle puts down her own academic achievements to what EAP has taught her: she was awarded with Distinction for her Master’s degree in 2017 and has gone on to pursue a PhD in applied linguistics at the University of York. A path she believes she would not have followed had it not been for the experience of teaching EAP.
“It takes cognitive toil and literary dexterity to pare an argument to its essentials, narrate it in an orderly sequence, and illustrate it with analogies that are both familiar and accurate.”
Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
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