商务英语论文THE SOFT SKILLS OF BUSINESS ENGLISH.doc

The Soft Skills of Business English The Soft Skills of Business English By Dr Goeran Nieragden, CologneAbstractThis article deals with the importance of the recent notion of soft skills for work-related language coaching, especially its role in Business English. It is argued that soft skills form not only a crucial and increasingly important topic in careers and career negotiations, but are also part and parcel of adult language tuition which tries to take seriously learners (and teachers) personalities. Both a number of general principles and concrete examples of making Soft Skills work in the class-room are discussed.What are soft skills?Not normally found on a CV, soft, or social skills are those personal values and interpersonal skills that determine a persons ability to fit into a particular structure, such as a project team, a rock group, or a company. The skills include personality traits like emotional maturity, eagerness to learn, and willingness to share and embrace new ideas.As regards the future of work, soft skills are fast becoming the deal breaker in many of todays hiring decisions. Executives, after all, are rarely measured according to how well they can re-iterate the technical specifications of their products and services, but rather on their ability to motivate an organization, to assess the performance of their staff, to make clear and well-balanced decisions, and, first and foremost, their ability to develop and communicate ideas and visions. A list of the most crucial skills would look something like the following:Interactionattitude awarenessconflict handlingco-operationdiversity tolerance(n)etiquetteinterlocutor orientationteamwork willingness Communicationdelegating skillslistening skillspresentation skills Self-Managementcompensation strategiesdecision makinglearning willingnessself-assessmentself-disciplineself-marketingstress resistance Organizationproblem solvingsystems thinkingtroubleshooting Figure 1: Soft skills in four categories (1)Though the total of 20 skills is grouped under four headings they are, of course, all closely interrelated: Learning willingness, e.g., is difficult to manifest if your time management does not work. And it is also true that soft skills are not exactly easy; if they were, it would be easy to teach everybody to be a Managing Director. In what follows, I will try to show that soft skills are gaining in importance in two contexts which are relevant to English in Adult Education, in native, but even more in non-native contexts: DOING BUSINESS and DOING BUSINESS ENGLISH both feature soft or social skills as objects, effects, and prerequisities.The skills are of growing importance in a world where business is marked by hot buzzwords such as globalization; decentralisation; and lean management. Of course it is a truism that in real life soft and hard skills (such as subject competence, resource handling, and market knowledge) go hand in hand. Hence, the selection instrument of an Assessment Centre is gaining in significance especially for high potential recruitment. Through its exercises in strategy development and strategy implementation, many companies and employment agencies argue, this two- to three-day intensive group performance session brings to light candidates abilities in conflict handling, co-operation and stress management. Admittedly, a traditional job interview or an old-fashioned IQ-test hardly warrant these results.Thus, though it is certainly helpful to know what technical terms such as benchmarking, B2B vs. B2C, business process re-engineering, customization, downsizing, outsourcing, and empowerment stand for, a mere word-list knowledge ignores the complex interpersonal problems these terms carry. If we want to teach learners of Business English how to deal with these problems interpersonally, soft skills handling is indispensable.The Teachability of Soft SkillsThough the skills would be difficult if not impossible to teach straightforwardly in any course, teaching can create contextualized tasks, and thus provide skills-related learning experience. Collateral learning seems to be the key word here, that is, the notion of a learner learning more than merely the subject that he or she is studying at a given time. If attitude awareness and problem solving are what count in the future, then, ideally, teaching should have a share in attitude formation and comparison.A soft skills framework should permit Business English to emphasize the interpersonal forces of language-use in a work-oriented context, and teachers should keep a sharp eye on the function of any language item which they want to highlight. In other words, they must teach the pragmatic force along with the words, evidenced, by textual (= structure-giving), propositional (= intention-determining) and interpersonal (= status-fixing) functions. Any mismatch of linguistic form and speakers intention leads to confusion, annoyance and misunderstanding, that is, causes havoc: Im not prepared to show my homework, e.g., can signal unwillingness, inability, criticism of unclear homework assignment, simple forgetting, and other things.Social Theorist Erving Goffman (1955) made that very clear with his theory of FACE and its twofold workings: In human interaction, Goffman argues, people strive for a positive social value, i.e. the approval of others (= a positive face, PF), while at the same time they also want to avoid other peoples impediment (= a negative face, NF). Criticism, negative comments and disapproval of an interlocutors personality or performance usually endanger his/her PF; requests, offers and compliments may threaten his/her NF: An invitation to golf causes offence (for the inviting party) if refused, debt (for the invited party) if accepted. Thus, what we normally tend to think of as plain and straightforward communicative exchange, in fact is a very thin layer of ice on which successful skating can be dangerous. If we take some very ordinary English sentences like the ones in Figure 2, it is apparent that they are not harmless and ordinary at all if we consider what might be implied for the involved peoples FACES: (2)SITUATIONUTTERANCE1.Pointing at a colleagues desk:That mouse-pad does look funny!2.On the way to the company car park:Do you have your mobile phone with you?3.On returning to your desk:I thought I put a cup of tea here.4.During a business meeting:Is anybody else here cold?5.Knocking on a colleagues office door:Are you busy right now?6.Asking a colleague in the canteen:Isnt that Mr Lawson over there?7.Sitting in a lecture theatre:Sorry, theres a lot of noise at this end.Figure 2: Sentences as threats to interlocutors faceThese sentences turn into downright traps if understood as a demand for action, an allegation of stealing tea, a request for assistance and so on and so forth. Rather than teaching students only how to construct and employ phrases like these, we should try to heighten their awareness of the inherent power relationship, trust and intimacy levels of the interlocutors; in short, the sentences challenges to the category of FACE. Language coaching, in turn, should adapt to the constantly changing face of English, and keep in mind the cognition-based concept of KAL (Knowledge About Language) which Ronald Carter has been promoting since the early 90s. The flexible character of this concept is meant to go beyond older ones, such as grammaticality, formal correctness and linguistic awareness. Carter wants language learning and teaching to (re-) start from scratch, i.e. to acknowledge insight into the new view:“A view which recognises Englishes as well as English and which stresses variable rules accords with a multilingual, culturally diverse view of society. . A critical language pedagogy does not so much aim simply to produce competence in use of a standard language, vitally important though that is, as to enable learners to reflect on the kind of English they use and how far it allows them to express their own personal voice as language users.” (Carter. 1997: 9, 226)This notion is closely related to the new standard of “ISSE (International Standard Spoken English)” which David Crystal (2000: 57) forecasts to emerge as the result of the increasing global use of and diversified influence on the language. He cannot be far from the truth, as it so happens that English is an immensely (and increasingly?) flexible language, crammed with idiom and slang, unusually hospitable to new words. It is not only the language of business and international politics, but also that of travel, sports and science, computer software and the music industry. Moreover, in times of boundless globalization, the idea of FACE is gaining particular importance in business contexts that involve cross-cultural aspects: In a business world where a German marketing officer is sent to Japan by her employer, a Finnish telecommunication corporate, in order to negotiate joint ventures for the emerging markets of Eastern Europe, it is certainly good to know about the main differences between British and American English, but what this person is very likely to encounter (and to use) herself, corresponds to neither variety.3 Given these conditions, English tuition should ideally proceed from linguistic competence => linguistic awareness => cultural awareness => cultural competence.Implications for LearningPhraseology, lexis and collocation are of primary importance in this approach of which grammatical accuracy is no longer the be-all and end-all. Our syllabus will have to pursue complex aims besides those of planting words and structures in students heads. This will of course remain the precondition of all attempts at soft and social skills. But whichever way the basics of structural grammar are brought to a learner, the techniques of drill patterning, total immersion or suggestopedia even, will not do when handling English aptly rather than using English correctly is at stake.Ideally, learners in the new position do not experience themselves as voiceless, and subject to external authority, not only as passive receivers, but rather as active discoverers, communicators and - most significant - creators of knowledge. The objectives of this idea of teaching become visible as improving learners active and passive knowledge of styles, registers and functions of language items (4); furthering their knowledge of the working mechanisms of business; involving them as far as possible in tasks of teacher-guided learning; and encouraging them to set up, implement and realize their individual learning strategies. These objectives, in turn, ask for a learning process that is fundamentally social, interactive, and self-directed - if we want to encourage our learners to take home more than Business English from a lesson in Business English, manifest in topics like Negotiating with Foreign Business Partners, Defying the Angry Customer or Serving International Markets, we must select, prepare and set tasks that involve reflective assessment and active training of one or more of the soft skills. Some general guidelines to make the upper-intermediate to advanced English class more learner-centred will be suggested now.When venturing on a new topic, teachers might start with a brainstorming session and elicit what students already know. Thus they will give the students a chance to start from their true personal vantage points; any accompanying material will then be taken not as a spoon- and force-fed medicine, not as the final word, but as one of many possible options. Space and room-allocation permitting, one could also ask students to write upon notice boards, flipcharts or whiteboards those aspects of a topic which they would most like to learn about. Tasks that are suitable for pairs or groups should tend to be open rather than closed, i.e. they should permit a variety of possible answers or solutions, or in any case, they should provide room for choice. In this way, they transport respect for any students individual attitude, and ask them to balance rather than venture their arguments. Two short examples might help to outline possible ways of realizing insights from soft skills training in the class-room.The first example is from the realm of Financial English and could run like this: For the topic of Takeovers and Buy-Outs we might begin with a list of relevant technical terms, strategies, model cases, pros and cons, etc. But students will only experience the position-dependent forms of emotional involvement (e.g., enthusiasm, greed, pride, low vs. high self-esteem, sense of failure, satisfaction of winning), if we can get them to approximate the atmosphere in which talks about the takeover process are likely to be conducted. So any group of four advanced students could be assigned the roles of the CEO of a failed start-up-company under threat (also its founder and main shareholder); the potential buyer (i.e. the representative of the bigger fish trying to swallow the smaller one); the white knight (senior business expert or other company backing the threatened companys case); and, especially in the case of leveraged buy-outs, i.e. buy-outs financed by third parties, the bank expert or financial organizer who backs the buyers interest. We could then ask students to prepare and simulate preliminary or final negotiations, arguing their individual cases, taking into account the other, hostile viewpoints all the time.The second example stems from the very crucial, and frequently requested topic of The Job Market/The Application Process. Very often, teachers confront students with real job ads and ask them to sketch an application, a cover letter, or a CV. Though this is certainly good training, it seems a rather lonely task in class, apart from the exchange of technical terms. These, I think, should be pre-taught for a lesson which uses job ads as a trigger for more group-oriented exercises. Referring to the well-known study The Human Side of Enterprise (1960) of American sociologist Douglas McGregor, we might outline his theory of two distinct types of work motivation and work performance: In what McGregor calls THEORY X, people are considered lazy by nature, disliking work, and in permanent need of supervision and control through a threats-and-rewards system. THEORY Y, by contrast, treats people as inherently self-motivated, committed to their workplace, willing to take responsibility and to make personal achievements, in short it assumes a psychological disposition to work within a framework of structures. Obviously, THEORY X provides a high degree of certainty and plannability,